Climate Sock

It’s been two years since a long day’s cycling in Andalucia produced the thought that a lot of unfounded speculation is spouted about public opinion on climate change. The idea was born of  a website about what people really think about the environment.

Who still cares about the climate?

In those two years, we’ve heard repeated claims that people are becoming less worried about climate change. The UEA email release – Climategate – has been blamed, though after trial may well have been innocent.

And despite some attempts to hype up the change in mood, opinion seemed to bounce back to near where it had been before.

So if it wasn’t UEA – or indeed Glaciergate – that changed people’s minds, perhaps it was the cold winters. And so perhaps the next one might do the same.

But on the other hand, maybe it was all down to the economy that had made climate change a relatively low priority.

Indeed perhaps all this is a misdiagnosis of people’s boredom with the argument between two rival camps. Just because they say they’re sick of the argument doesn’t mean they’re not worried about climate change.

Campaigns and politics

So all isn’t lost for climate change campaigners. People would even go along with higher environmental taxes in some situations (not that these are necessarily the answer). But making climate change about cute animals misses the mark, at least in the short term.

But there’s still work to do to show why climate change is a tangible environmental problem, though connecting with worries about an energy shortage doesn’t seem to be the answer.

We’ve seen the need to learn the lessons of professional communications campaigns, as well – perhaps – as from a couple of unexpected NGOs. And above all, campaigners need to avoid letting governments be seen as the only ones dealing with climate change.

Talking of politics, the 2010 election presented some interesting challenges for the major parties. We saw Caroline Lucas elected as a Green MP, and relatively strong prospects for the Greens to win more seats. Though outside Brighton, the last election wasn’t great for them, despite fighting some interesting battles.

In Australia, talking about climate change seems to have become ever more of a contact sport and was kept out of the general election, which yielded more challenges for the Greens. But despite the ferocity, it looks like climate change is still a major worry for Australians.

Energy and energy disasters

It’s been two years of environmental calamities that have caused only minor tremors on the polling charts.

The Gulf of Mexico spill wreaked environmental havoc but hardly revolutionised US attitudes to off-shore drilling. Fukushima also didn’t cause much of a stir in views of nuclear power, at least in the US and UK.

At least the nuclear disaster did remind us how much the nuclear industry like polling (a lot, and they really aren’t afraid to use it). Which is a little odd, because the best their polls ever show is nuclear being grudgingly accepted.

Good polls and bad polls

And the constant backdrop to all the numbers has been the twin frustrations of good polls being badly reported, and bad polls being unquestioningly reported.

Even the good guys sometimes do bad polls, and the way polls are reported can do a lot to fix the problem. But that doesn’t always happen and that’s why there’s still a need for nerds to check the data.

Thank you so much for reading and for your comments and suggestions. I’ll be announcing changes to Climate Sock soon, which I hope will provide the basis for more number crunching and opinion checking.

Climate change ‘more important than immigration’

Climate change should be a higher priority for the government than immigration, according to findings of a new poll revealed exclusively in Climate Sock. The results will delight environmental campaigners, who have long been calling for climate change to be taken more seriously as a political issue.

According to the poll, 46% more people think that climate change is an important issue in their life than say the same about immigration or asylum. The results will put pressure on the government, which was criticised last week by environmental leaders, who said it was failing to live up to its pledge to be the “greenest government ever”.

The findings will also put an end to doubts about the public’s trust in the work of climate scientists. Following the 2009 hacking and release online of emails from the world-leading Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, there was widespread speculation that public opinion was increasingly turning against the view that climate change was caused by human activity.

Any doubts now appear to have been overcome, with three in four of those surveyed by Ipsos MORI saying that they think human activity has a significant effect on the climate.

Welcoming the results, Eddard Stark, head of the environmental charity Climate Campaigners, said “The government can no longer hide behind the myth that the public have higher priorities. These results send a clear message: the country wants action to stop climate change, and it wants it now”.

Global warming? Bring it on!

Brits are looking forward to the effects of global warming, according to findings of a new poll revealed exclusively in Climate Sock. The results will delight observers who have long argued that environmental pressure groups routinely exaggerate the negative side of climate change.

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Consider this plausible scenario. An airline’s new poll finds that most people want airport capacity to be increased. Two weeks later an environmental NGO announces that their own poll has found two-thirds oppose airport expansion.

Both polls are conducted by reputable agencies, and both interviewed representative samples of over 1,000 people.

How can we reconcile these two polls, and how should journalists report them?

It’s not a problem with polling

The problem is not that polling is inherently untrustworthy. Conducting a poll of 1,000 randomly chosen people means speaking to about 0.002% of the UK adult population. Yet the results are so reliable that, 19 times out of 20, the result you get will be within 3 percentage points of the result you would get if you asked every single person in the country. UK Polling Report offer a good explanation for why this is the case.

Alternatively, if wading through probabilities isn’t your thing, just consider YouGov’s five most recent political polls. For each, they interviewed over 2,000 different people; the proportion who said they would vote Labour were, respectively, 44%, 42%, 45%, 42%, 42%.

If polling itself is untrustworthy, the consistency in these results would require either quite a coincidence or a grand conspiracy. And for anyone tempted to call it a fix, just remember the outraged reaction when, after the second leaders’ debate last year, YouGov’s instant poll found that Cameron ‘won’. It would be a twisted conspiracy indeed if YouGov rigged polls for the Tories last year, and are now doing so in favour of Labour.

So the problem is not that polling is inherently untrustworthy. The problem is this:

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Crikey.  You wait months for fresh data and then two big ones come at once.  And such is life, they say pretty much opposite things. I’ll get to some proper analysis later, but just for now some first thoughts.

Firstly, about the polls. There’s one in the Guardian that apparently shows concern about climate change to be at the same level now as it was in August ’09, i.e. before the UEA emails, the cold winters, Copenhagen, and the relentless stories about how no-one believes in climate change any more.

Then, there’s one in the Mail – which is actually reporting ONS data from August last year – that shows that agreement with climate science is lower now than it’s been at any point since ’06 (when the figures begin).

So, my reactions:

This isn’t a case of the Guardian being climate warriors and the Mail being climate deniers

As far as I can see, both are reporting the data accurately. There’s no apparent cherry picking, and it looks like the comparisons with previous polls are fair. The Guardian’s reporting stands out for linking directly to both data sets, which I don’t remember ever seeing before – round of applause for Damian Carrington – but the Mail’s doesn’t say anything that I don’t think is justifiable (though it took quite a while to find the data – any reason they couldn’t link to it?).

The questions are different and may not be measuring the same phenomenon

I’ve been saying for a while that the decrease in people saying they’re absolutely convinced that the climate is changing/that global warming is a very big problem may be a factor of the way the ‘debate’ between climate warriors and deniers is being conducted. It’s become so vitriolic that many people are heading for the middle ground, on the assumption that both sides are partly right (or because they’re just sick of it).

So a question like ONS’s, whose answer choices are “very convinced/fairly convinced/not very convinced/not at all convinced/don’t know” would tend to lose people from the extremes of the scale to the middle (as happens to an extent: 45% in ’06 to 41% now).

In contrast, the Guardian’s question was on a discrete scale and didn’t present the contrast between firm opinion vs middle ground (climate change already a threat / will be a threat in the future / not a threat / don’t know). Maybe as a result, there’s less of an effect from the way the debate is being conducted and reported.

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I like:

• Trees. Particularly when they’re part of forests.
• People being able to get into forests pretty well unrestricted.
• People’s views being taken into account when government policy is formed.

Because of all that, I’m a bit sad about what I’m about to write.

If you’re in the UK, there’s a good chance you’ve seen or heard coverage of 38 Degrees’ poll, which apparently showed that 75% of the public are against the government’s plans to privatise parts of the UK’s forests (and change the way it manages the rest). It’s had coverage, well pretty much everywhere – from the Bleeding Hearties at the Guardian and BBC to those bastions of anti-green activism at the Sun and Telegraph.

So being a nerd, the first thing I did when I heard the news was go look for the data. And this was when I started getting sad.

1. The data wasn’t published when the articles were written

To my knowledge, all of this coverage was put together on the basis of the info given to the press by 38 Degrees (the data was put up on the YouGov site today, Monday, with the coverage posted on Saturday or Sunday). It’s possible the data were sent to the journalists before YouGov published it (in which case I apologise for this point) – though I personally couldn’t get hold of it before YouGov put it up.

We’ve seen several times before why this matters. If journalists cover a poll without seeing the data, they’re relying entirely on the word of the people who are trying to promote their own interest.

In November, we saw an EDF poll that won coverage of apparent strong support for a new nuclear power station, on the basis of a question that came after respondents had been reminded of the employment benefits a power station could bring.

And we’ve seen other polls reported with absolutely no data ever published. Like the claim made in an Easyjet press release last year that a YouGov poll showed that 80% of UK consumers wanted a rethink of Air Passenger Duty. Without the data apparently being available, there’s no way of knowing that it was true.

Now, this isn’t 38 Degrees’ problem. Everyone does it – after all, when you’ve got a shiny new poll fresh off the press, why not get coverage for it straight away?  And of course if you’re a journalist and you know that various competitors have also got the same poll story, you’ve got to cover it straight away. But here’s another reason why that’s a bad idea:

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In this week’s Economist, there’s a bold assertion casually dropped into an article about the cold winter*: “Britain’s scepticism about climate change … [is] already more widespread than in many other European countries”.

Leaving aside the escape route that ‘many’ provides, it’s quite a claim, and one that I’m not sure I’ve seen evidence for. So what defence can we make of it?

The annual HSBC Climate Confidence Monitor is a good source of international data on attitudes to climate change. It asks consistent questions in a decent number of countries (currently 15 countries), so gives us results that can be measured between countries and over time. This year’s results have recently come out, and are available here.

But before we look at the results, there’s something we need to talk about. Across the world, people respond to survey questions in ways that differ consistently from country to country. In some countries, people are generally more likely to choose upper points on a scale, and in other countries, people tend to stay closer to the middle. In my experience, we see a much higher proportion of people choosing upper points on a scale in China than we do in Germany, for example.

This matters a great deal when we’re comparing international data sets. Because of this difference in international scale-usage patterns, it wouldn’t necessarily be fair, for example, to look at a poll that shows 75% in China saying they’re very worried about climate change, and compared that with 60% in Germany who say the same, and conclude that more people in China are worried about climate change than in Germany.

It’s much safer to look at the kinds of questions that avoid scale-usage patterns. While a question like “On a 7-point scale, how worried are you about climate change” would be subject to scale-usage patterns, a question like “Which of these issues are you most worried about” wouldn’t be, because interviewees have to select just one of the issues.

This brings us back to the HSBC data. There is indeed a question in the poll that avoids scale-usage issues: a list of issues, with interviewees asked to select which is their top concern.

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From time to time a news story comes out citing a poll that isn’t in the public domain. These articles are written on the basis of a press release – apparently all the information the journalist has about the poll.

Given that journalists are supposed to be a cynical bunch, this always strikes me as surprising. By writing up the data from the press release without checking the poll themselves, they’re taking a leap of faith that they’ve been given a fair representation of the truth. Since these press releases (of course) show results that are helpful to the organisation that commissioned the poll, you would expect due diligence for a journalist to include checking the data.

A recent poll by EDF Energy, carried out by ICM, shows why this matters.

The research was conducted among 1002 adults living near the Hinkley Point Power Station, and asked about their attitudes to nuclear power and the possible construction of a new plant.

On the strength of the poll, EDF put out this press release, in which they said that “Nearly four times as many local people support plans for a new power station at Hinkley Point than oppose it”, and that “63% support the development of Hinkley Point C”. The press release was picked up quite widely by local media, including the BBC. Nice job by their PR people in winning positive local coverage.

Fortunately, ICM is a member of the British Polling Council (BPC) and abides by its rules. These rules are strongly weighted towards transparency, and include the stipulation that where research findings have entered the public domain – as in this poll – the full data and complete wording of the questionnaire must be made available.

As ever, ICM have done this, and we can look at the data here to test out EDF’s claim.

Firstly, there’s no dispute about the figures they’ve issued. As they say, 63% are “strongly in favour” or “slightly in favour” of the potential development of Hinkley Point C, and only 17% are slightly or strongly opposed.

However, being able to see the complete data also allows us to see the wording of the whole questionnaire.  The sequence of questions runs:

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It looks like we’ve had the starting pistol for the biannual ritual of the season’s change justifying a spate of articles predicting the next few months’ weather. It’s always fun for us Brits, though not exactly harmless. Misreporting of a Met Office’s 2009 seasonal forecast – as a ‘barbecue summer’ – somehow led to serious suggestion that it should be sold off, despite its record as one of world’s most accurate forecasting bodies.

Now this autumn, the Guardian has pitched in with a story about the early arrival of some Bewick’s swans to the UK. Apparently their early departure from Siberia, tied with a cold forecast for the week ahead, was enough to justify an article predicting a cold winter ahead.

Without wanting to take the article too seriously (it is, after all, only a well-executed piece of PR by the Slimbridge Wetland Centre), the prospect of a cold winter should be a worry for anyone campaigning on climate change. Last year, we saw the collapse of talks in Copenhagen; Climategate; Glaciergate (the stories don’t need to be true to have been reported as damaging climate science) – and the coldest winter in the UK for 31 years. Of these, the weather may well have done the most to influence public concern about climate change.

The evidence for this is circumstantial because no-one asked the right questions, but seems fairly strong. A poll in December ’09, when the stories about UEA emails were at their peak, showed no significant movement in agreement with climate science. Yet, another poll, in January ’10, when the UEA stories had died down, but the cold weather was at its most severe, showed a significant drop in agreement that climate change was a reality (though I think methodological problems with this latter poll seriously weaken it). In the other direction, we’ve also seen that confidence in climate science increases when heatwaves or storms cause major disruption, and the media attribute this weather to climate change.

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Last week, we saw that Australian PM Julia Gillard’s proposal for a citizens’ assembly to analyse and propose climate policy was widely criticised – but that despite the hype, there really wasn’t any evidence that it was turning the election against Labor. A week on, and it looks like the fuss about Gillard’s plan has completely disappeared, and climate change has become the muzzled dog of the campaign.

For anyone not following the election – you’re missing out. When Gillard called the election last month after toppling Rudd to become Prime Minister, Labor had a fairly healthy lead over the Liberal/National Coalition. But of the last eight polls, three have given the lead to the Coalition, three to Labour (including one being reported as I write), and two call it as a dead heat.  The excellent Pollytics has produced an election simulator that gives a wafer-thin majority to Labor, but it’s clear at this point that the result could easily tip either way.

One of the key factors will be the performance and role of the Greens. They could be crucial in two ways. Firstly, they have a good shot of winning the Melbourne Division from Labor, having polled 45% in the redistributed share in the last election. In an election as close as this, the result in that one seat could make a big difference to Labor – and potentially to the Greens if they win it, and can use its leverage in helping Labor form a government.

Secondly, while the Greens didn’t have any seats in the lower house of the last parliament, they’re polling at around 13% and the election uses Alternative Vote. To bring their redistributed share above 50%, Labor will rely on Green second preferences votes; in the latest Nielsen poll, Labor is getting 83% of those votes – which is strong but leaves perhaps crucial room for improvement.

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The Australian media has been deeply critical of Julia Gillard’s proposal for a citizens’ assembly to explore policy responses to climate change. It’s been attacked both by advocates, and critics, of action to tackle climate change – with the coverage attributing particular significance in the heat of the election campaign.

There’s indeed some polling evidence to suggest that voters aren’t convinced by Gillard’s proposal, but its importance in influencing the election seems to have been exaggerated. Despite some of the claims, there’s very little evidence that it’s having much of an impact on voting intentions.

Gillard’s proposal is for a 150-strong assembly of citizens, selected to be nationally representative, which would analyse and discuss climate issues, and make recommendations to policy-makers. According to the Sydney Morning Herald, a majority of 53% oppose the proposal, while 41% support it. Another poll for the Daily Telegraph apparently found 62% opposed.

Unfortunately, Australian pollsters don’t appear to be as obliging with their data as are those in some other countries, so I only have these papers’ word to go on for the results of the polls, and can’t check how fairly they’re worded.  This is important because the wording of a question can have a huge impact on the results that come out. But taking the two polls on face value, the conclusion appears to be that the policy is slightly unpopular – but not wildly so.

Despite this, some of the coverage has presented public reaction in a very different light. According to the Australian, “voters have turned against Labor’s proposal for a citizens assembly on climate change”. 3AW claim it could be “the ‘turning point’” of the election.

But these claims that the policy is swinging the election look rather like bluster without any real evidence behind it. Gillard made the announcement on 23^rd July. Since then, the polls have shown no trends and no movement outside the margin of error. One pollster has Labor falling 3pts; another shows them gaining 2pts, then losing 2pts in the next poll; a third has them falling 1.5pt and then losing another point in a subsequent poll.

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