Climate Sock

One of the idiosyncrasies of the nuclear industry is that they love polling. As a result we have a pretty good idea of what the world thinks of nuclear power, and how it’s changed over the years.

Charmingly, they’ve kept at the public polling after Fukushima, and so we can see how opinion’s changed after that, too. This is really useful because with an event this prominent, the media tend to assume that the public have been paying attention, and that public opinion must have undergone a dramatic shift.

Sometimes this is fair. The MPs’ expenses scandal did capture public attention and brought attitudes towards politicians even lower than they had been before.  But other high-profile media stories, like the UEA email release, came and went without having all that much impact on public opinion.

In the UK and US at least, Fukushima is looking like the latter kind of story, where a lot of media attention doesn’t lead to much of a change of attitudes.

It’s certainly had a huge amount of coverage. Compare on Google Trends for the UK the words “nuclear” and “news of the world”, the other major story of the last few months (before the riots, which dwarf the others):

So “nuclear” seems to have got more news coverage than “news of the world”, but been used slightly less in searches. We get something similar (with fewer hits) if we use “Fukushima” or “hacking”.

read more »

Caring about international public views on nuclear power shouldn’t be at the top of many people’s to-do list right now. For one, donating to the Red Cross should be a lot of places higher (and that’s also, sort of, what I’m going to write about).

But pretty soon now, once the stories from Japan of individual tragedy and wonderful survival have been played out, much of the media will turn to the question of whether nuclear power is safe. And a part of that reporting will be, whether people think that nuclear power is safe.

We can safely assume that public enthusiasm for nuclear energy, around the world, is right now taking a battering (as I write, there hasn’t been a nuclear disaster). We can also expect that a lot will be written about public attitudes to nuclear power. What I want to do here is collect some of the international data from polls conducted before the earthquake.

In summary from those polls: over the last decade (and possibly longer), overt opposition to nuclear power has fallen significantly.  Now (that is, from polls taken before the earthquake), a majority would support the introduction, or continued use, of nuclear power as one of the ways of generating electricity.

UK

I’ve written a couple of times before about attitudes towards nuclear power in the UK, most recently here.

Overall, there has been a relatively consistent fall in opposition to the continued use of nuclear energy to replace existing supply:

That said, other UK polls have shown that though nuclear power may not be so widely opposed as it had been before, it’s seen much less favourably than other forms of power generation. Nuclear only noses ahead of gas and coal when it’s put in the context of global warming and climate change. Read more on that here.

US

Polls from Gallup show that overall attitudes in the US have followed a similar trend. As in the UK, those supporting the use of some nuclear power overtook those opposing it around ten years ago. Since then, the lead has continued to widen:

read more »

It’s not so long since I argued that the economy was bringing down concern about the environment (and, err, that article hasn’t exactly been buried in a recent deluge of posts). The data indicated that, across a range of countries, people were becoming less worried about climate change (and other environmental issues) at around the same time that national GDPs were falling.

This suggested an explanation for the recent fall in concern about climate change, which was different from those explanations we’ve seen before (like challenges to climate science, or recent cold winters). Intuitively this explanations seems more convincing since it doesn’t assume that people spend much time pontificating about climate change, as the other explanations do. In fact, it essentially assumes the opposite, which is probably reasonable.

But the last two climate polls I’ve seen suggest that maybe things have started to change. We’ve already seen that the Guardian’s recent ICM poll found that 83% think that climate change is a threat now or will be in the future – crucially, that’s the same as they found in August ’09. This marked a change from other recent polls, which all seemed to point to some fall in concern about climate change that occurred after August ’09.

Perhaps opinion had indeed started to shift. Or alternatively that poll could have been an outlier. Without another poll to back it up, it was hard to tell (this is of course the problem for media outlets when they’re reporting their own expensively bought poll: any single poll can be an outlier, and indeed the more exciting and headline-friendly a poll is, the more likely it is to be an outlier. Sites like 538 and UK Polling Report, which report polls from across the firms, are a good way of sense-checking any individual poll).

My hesitancy about the poll still stands, but another one lends a little straw in the wind. A new Economist/YouGov poll in the US has found a fairly similar result – that over the last year, agreement that global warming is happening has remained consistent:

read more »

Here’s an issue that, I think, says a lot about the challenges facing anyone campaigning or trying to move policy on climate change. Gallup’s annual tracker on climate change has a set of answers which suggests that climate change continues to be seen as a relatively abstract issue, and not something that affects people’s lives in a tangible way.

First, to the numbers. The Gallup poll asked Americans how concerned they are about various environmental issues, covering pollution, biodiversity loss, and global warming. Of all the issues polled, global warming provoked the lowest level of concern (fieldwork March 2009):

For anyone who thinks that global warming/climate change is the greatest environmental threat to human development, these results should be quite worrying. They suggest that the seriousness of climate change is not very well understood in comparison with more proximate threats like pollution. As the basis for public campaigns about climate change, that is not very helpful.

Why should global warming be so far down the list, given the extent of coverage about it in comparison with the other issues on the list (this isn’t to assert that climate change receives an appropriate amount of coverage – simply that it tends to receive more than other environmental issues)? I think two factors are driving this.

read more »

Some new(ish) analysis of climate attitudes in the US helpfully puts more solid numbers against a lot of what we’ve seen here in the past. The analysis was run by an academic at Michigan State Uni, and shows the effect of different factors on attitudes and knowledge about climate change.

It’s a very straight-forward paper (go on, have a look), which draws on Gallup Polls from over the last eight years to build a dataset that’s big enough for some serious subgroup analysis. The main focus of the paper – which is picked up by Leo Hickman in the Guardian Environment Blog – is about gender differences. These are indeed interesting, and there are a few other striking issues that the analysis shows.

Gender notwithstanding, the factor that is most strongly correlated with concern about climate change is an individual’s knowledge about it. This is knowledge as measured by the likelihood to answer that global warming is already happening, is man-made, and that most scientists believe it is occurring – rather than a stated level of personal knowledge (which yields quite different results).  Of course, some people would dispute these as objective measures of knowledge.

I see two possible readings of this correlation between concern and knowledge. You could argue that this proves that if someone knows about climate change, that knowledge makes them worry. But the alternative causal direction could also be valid. Someone who – for whatever reason – has become concerned about climate change then goes onto learn more about it, and this knowledge could potentially not have any impact on their overall level of concern (in theory).

Maybe that one wasn’t so surprising, but others are a bit more interesting. After knowledge, the factors that correlate most with concern about climate change are, in order of the strength of the correlation:

Political ideology and party affiliation: the more Democratic and liberal a person is, the more likely they are to be knowledgeable and concerned about climate change.

read more »

Busily working on a presentation this weekend (which will be up here soon), so just a couple of links to some interesting new polls:

The Understanding Risk group have recently released their data for a UK national poll focused on climate change and energy sources. It’s got loads to look at, and the results can be interpreted in various ways, particularly with the comparison with a 2005 data .  One way of looking at it is  that there’s no evidence that people have become any more worried about climate change since 2005 (and arguably have become less concerned).  But most people are still pretty worried, and levels of outright rejection are still very low.

A poll from Stanford shows that in the US about a third now remember hearing stories about climate scientists’ emails, and about a quarter remember stories about the IPCC’s reports. The unspecified climate scientists come out slightly better than the IPCC – perhaps reflecting US feelings about international institutions. (Thanks Bob Ward for pointing this one out)

Another US poll, this one from Yale/George Mason, indicates that scientists are the most trusted source of information about global warming – and that trust has recovered after a small drop in January (though not much beyond margin of error). Another part of this poll is accessible here.

And finally… a very PR-friendly poll from Greenpeace. Apparently nearly three quarters in Suffolk want more investment in clean energy like wind power.

It may be natural to assume that one of the things that will come out of the Gulf oil spill is a swing in US opinion, away from oil exploration, and towards less polluting sources. But the polls are surprisingly undramatic on the subject. Overall, there appears be less growth than might be expected in US public opposition to offshore drilling

In terms of the current level of support for offshore drilling the US, two different polls conducted in May (i.e. after the spill) show satisfyingly similar numbers. According to Angus Reid, 57% support “drilling for oil and gas in the coastal areas around the United States”. A poll by Public Policy Polling, found 55% support “drilling for oil off the American coastline”. A further 10% and 15% are undecided in the respective polls.

Whether this shows any change in attitudes from before the spill is less clear. I’m yet to find a national US poll that asked a comparable question (i.e. support for any offshore drilling) before April. A Gallup poll in May ’08 showed 57% supporting an expansion of drilling into US coastal and wilderness areas that were then off-limits.  We might conclude that if 57% wanted an expansion of drilling two years ago, and now the same proportion would support any drilling, support must have fallen at least a little.

Unexpectedly, the best answer for confirming this appears to come from Fox News. As luck would have it, they polled on offshore drilling two weeks before the crisis started, and have repeated the same question twice since then: “Do you favor or oppose increasing offshore drilling for oil and gas in U.S. coastal areas?”. The results are clear – a drop, but not a haemorrhage, in support for drilling:

read more »