Since then, we’ve seen polls on politics, energy sources and supposed climate fatigue, and some international comparisons too.

But new polls aren’t published as often as I’d like, nor does opinion usually change all that quickly. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to find new things to write about on a regular basis while remaining within the boundaries of what people think about the environment.

So Climate Sock is moving, to become part of a new site. In Noise of the Crowd, I’ll be looking at interesting things about public opinion: not only about the environment, but including anything that’s surprising, counter-intuitive or adds to current new stories.

Climate Sock will continue to live in Noise of the Crowd. All the old posts and comments have been transferred across, and everything about the environment has the tag ‘Climate Sock’, which you can access on the left of the site.

When new and interesting data about the environment are published, I intend still to write new articles, building on what we’ve already seen. I hope that readers of Climate Sock will carry on finding things that interest you in the new site, including environment articles but perhaps also including other ones as well. The change will mean that the site will keep being updated with fresh articles, even when there’s not been anything new about the environment.

I always appreciate your comments and would love to hear what you think about the new site, and any suggestions about how I could improve it.

Before I go. Following the last post’s linkfest, I wanted to pick out a couple of old Climate Sock posts that I thought were more interesting than others.  If you’re new to the sites, they’re probably a good place to start.

We shouldn’t be spending too much energy worrying about ‘belief’ in climate change.

Climate change campaigners often target altruism when appealing to self-interest may be more effective.

While people want action to tackle climate change, they’re deeply suspicious of government involvement.

Nuclear power is seen to have some advantages over gas, coal and oil, but it’s still greeted with suspicion.

The UK Greens get many fewer votes nationally than UKIP and the BNP, but they’re in a much stronger position to win seat

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.

The results were interesting. They suggested that people were more willing to reduce their energy consumption to help the environment than to protect the UK’s energy security; yet it also seemed that people wanted the government to prioritise protecting the energy supply over providing more environmentally friendly electricity.

It’s since been pointed out to me that the wording of the ‘personal responsibility’ question may have had a misleading influence. The option for energy security was phrased as ‘To conserve energy now to make sure the UK has enough in future’.

As was suggested to me, an interviewee might take issue with the implication that there are transferable units of electricity that can be used immediately or saved for later. Of course not using a unit of electricity today doesn’t mean that the unit will continue to be available tomorrow.

So perhaps my conclusion, that individuals see themselves as having a greater role in tackling climate change than they do in tackling energy security, was overstated.

And in fact another poll suggests exactly that.

ComRes research for IBM finds that 79% agree that “Every individual has a responsibility to monitor their own energy usage to avoid wasting the country’s energy supply”. Though there’s no direct comparison with how far people see an individual responsibility to avert climate change, you don’t get much higher than 4 in 5 people agreeing that individual action is needed.

That said, the ComRes poll also suggests that energy security isn’t a pressing issue for most. Although most say it’s everyone’s responsibility to act, only 32% think that there will be power cuts in the UK because of energy shortages in the next 5-10 years. Perhaps this is because they think a solution will be found, or perhaps it’s because they don’t think there’s all that much of a problem to begin with.

So it seems that people aren’t averse to seeing it as individual (ie not just government or energy company) responsibility to help with energy consumption. But at the same time, there isn’t a widespread view that we’re facing an energy disaster that requires urgent action.

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”.

Yet despite this widespread coverage – of something that isn’t the greatest ad for nuclear power – public opinion in the UK and US doesn’t seem to have changed that much.

The last time we looked at this we saw that support for nuclear power had been growing over the last decade or so. Now the polls have been updated since Fukushima, it looks like support has only fallen slightly, not undoing the gains that have been made in the last ten years.

In the UK, net support for replacement nuclear power stations (% who support, minus % who oppose) has fallen from +28 to +7 according to Mori’s regular tracking poll. It sounds like a big fall, but it puts opinion back only to where it was in 2007.

Results are similar in the US. Gallup found in a poll at the height of the media focus on the crisis that net support for the construction of nuclear plants in the US was at -3: a 16-point fall on before the crisis, and around where opinion was in ’01.

Remember that for each two points of net change here, only 1% of people need to change their mind. That is, if support falls from 60% to 59% and opposition increases from 40% to 41%, net support falls by two points.

So, in net changes of 19 points and 16 points, we’re seeing the effect of between 8-10% of people changing their mind. Those don’t strike me as particularly big changes, given the drama of the crisis and the impact it would have if it was replicated in the US or the UK.

Two possible – and very different – explanations for this occur to me.

One is disengagement. It wouldn’t be the first time that an issue has received a great amount of media attention, but hasn’t really captured the public’s interest. This, though, would need to explain why it seems to have triggered such a high level of internet searching.

An alternative explanation is a ‘rational’ response. Perhaps a nuclear disaster triggered by an earthquake and tsunami was seen as just not relevant in the UK and (much of) the US. But this doesn’t in itself explain why the reaction in Germany seems to have been so different.

Somewhere between the two explanations is the possibility that it was seen as a ‘foreign’ news story: something of voyeuristic interest but with no instinctive connection to people’s lives. It may have been of great interest, but many people may have not consciously associated it with their opinion on energy sources in their country.

Whichever explanation is more accurate (and I’d suggest each applies to different people), for all the assertions that attitudes to nuclear energy will force policy changes, the reality is that for most people in the UK and US, Fukushima changed little.

–

Hat-tip @NeilStockley for latest UK poll

A new poll by ComRes tackles this question. Having been commissioned by Centrica, its focus is on domestic energy usage, and it suggests a tension between what people are doing now and what they might be willing to do in the future.

According to the poll, three quarters of UK adults have recently tried to reduce the amount of gas and electricity they use. The reasons given for these reductions are interesting:

That price should be top isn’t surprising, but I’m struck that nearly twice as many say they reduced their energy use to help the environment as say they did so to protect the UK’s energy supply.

This surprised me a little because polling I’ve seen in the past has shown that, as reasons for energy conservation, energy security is generally more compelling than climate change.

And we do in fact see something similar in a later question in this poll.

When we move away from what people are doing, and onto what they want the government to do, we get a different picture:

So now the positions are reversed. People are about twice as likely to think that the government’s energy priority should be securing the energy supply than that its priority should be making the energy supply more environmentally friendly.

Perhaps this is a matter of pragmatism, reflecting the scale of the government compared with individuals. People might think that the government can have an impact on securing the UK’s energy supply, while individually they cannot.

But at the same time, there also seems to be a view that individuals can have an impact on climate change, which as a challenge appears at least as enormous as energy security.

And a third question confuses things further. Respondents were asked how much additional they’d be prepared to pay for their energy bills per year by 2020, to achieve certain goals.

It’s not a great question. Since energy bills vary so widely between properties it’s hard to know what to make of the answers in isolation.  But comparing the results is interesting.

On average, people say they would pay £81 more “to make sure the lights stay on in the future”. Yet, they would only pay £67 more “to make sure sources of energy are more environmentally friendly”.

So, people say they’re cutting back now to protect the environment, more than for energy security. Energy security, they say, is the government’s responsibility and not theirs.

But when thinking about what they’d do in the future, there’s more willingness to make sacrifices to keep electricity flowing than to make them in the name of environmentalism.

Perhaps this is about how the issues are framed. The lights going out is a clear, tangible threat. Making sacrifices for unspecified environmental reasons doesn’t have such an evident benefit. It may be that this is emphasised by the way these particular questions are worded, but they don’t seem especially unusual in using this frame.

It’s not the first time we’ve seen evidence to suggest a lack of depth in current environmentally friendly behaviour. If people are indeed less concerned about the environment than their willingness to make some cut-backs might suggest, there is a danger that such actions won’t be sustained when confronted with other pressures.

But while some of the criticisms of the poll seem fair, I suggest that dismissing it would be a mistake.

At the heart of the debate is data that appear to suggest that Australians’ concern about climate change has plummeted in recent years. The same question has been used in the annual polls for several years, allowing a comparison of attitudes over time.

The resulting chart is this:

Which immediately suggests a dramatic fall in concern about climate change: from nearly 7 in 10 wanting action even at significant cost in 2006, to only 4 in 10 saying the same now.

The main challenge to the data has been on the basis of the structure of the question. Joseph Reser at Griffith University, has argued both that the length of the questions is a problem, and that the answer choices “contain multiple and emotional button-pressing matters and language”.

The result, he argues, is that the poll fails to measure the public’s understanding or perceptions of risk in an issue as complex as climate change. Significantly, it also appears to show a lower level of concern than is identified in other polls that individually examine different aspects of attitudes to the issue.

All of this seems fair. The question wording is indeed long, and it does contain some emotive language. But I don’t think that makes the result any less interesting or important.

It’s crucial to note that the question was asked in the same way every year: while the question contains some emotive language, that hasn’t changed. Five years ago, a great majority were prepared to see significant costs to tackle climate change; now it’s a minority.

The results may reflect what we’ve seen in other polls: that questions about climate change are increasingly being treated as political identifiers. We saw that even 62% of those in the UK who claimed to think climate change was not yet proven were still pleased to see action taken to tackle it.

So there are those who, on careful reflection and with the right questioning, will say that climate change is a problem; but they will at other times say that it’s a socialist conspiracy and they’ll have no part in tackling it.

This may explain why a poll like this shows results that are so different to those from polls that take more time to ask about climate change in detail. But it’s also why I wouldn’t dismiss its findings.

Most of the time, most of us behave according to our general, top-of-mind opinions about people and issues, however far these may contradict our rational views. We don’t think about the issues most of the time, so it’s not a problem. Many people spend money on things they know they don’t really need, even though they might agree, when pushed, that there are better uses for their money.

Likewise with climate change. If asked to think carefully, most people would say it’s a problem, and then that it requires serious attention. But most of the time, most people think about it in the way it’s usually framed. This is increasingly as a battleground between extremist factions, with politicians using it as an excuse to raise taxes.

This growing view is what the new poll seems to capture, with important consequences for the political debate about climate change.

(HT: Alice Bell)

One such appears in the Ashcroft poll, from a question about attitudes towards various NGOs. For clarity’s sake, I’ve grouped the responses into ‘support’ and ‘oppose’ in the table below:

You may draw your own conclusions, but here are a few of mine.

The most popular are two NGOs traditionally considered to be of the liberal left: Greenpeace and Amnesty International. It might be argued that, until relatively recently, all NGOs were largely leftish, so it’s not surprising that the longer-established ones are best known and respected. There may be some truth in this, but the fact they receive very little opposition is striking given that Greenpeace in particular has a record of being very outspoken and skirting close to the edge of the law.

Two organisations that are very effective as political campaigners, Immigration Watch and the Taxpayers’ Alliance, have among the lowest public understanding of their mission. The Taxpayers’ Alliance in particular seem to be on major UK news programmes on a weekly basis, yet half the British public don’t know seems to know what they stand for. This strikes me as an important lesson for small organisations that want to have a large impact, but don’t believe they have the resources to earn widespread name recognition.

I’m taken aback by the Fathers 4 Justice’s scores. For an organisation associated with superheroes on palace balconies, which has generated a couple of own splinter organisations (The Real Fathers 4 Justice, New Fathers 4 Justice), its ratings are exceptional. They’re also very consistent across different groups: women score it nearly as highly as men; Guardian readers are only slightly lower than Mail and Telegraph readers.

And on those lines, a couple of details about Greenpeace’s scores. While they do particularly well among Labour (79% support) and Lib Dem voters (78%), they don’t score badly among Tory voters (59%). Equally, their scores are very high with Guardian (90%) and Indy readers (84%), but they’re perfectly respectable among Mail (63%) and Telegraph readers (60%) too. Intriguingly, one of the groups who seem least well disposed to them (‘just’ 57% support) are those who are the most positively inclined towards David Cameron. Make of that what you will.

There’s no doubt that FPTP exaggerates results. Below a certain share of the national vote, parties get fewer seats than they would under a PR system. Above that level, they get more.

Yet the UK Greens do have one MP, and they are in fact less hard done by under FPTP than the other UK-wide parties of similar size: the UK Independence Party (UKIP) and the British National Party (BNP).

In the 2010 election, the Greens nationally won 286k votes (1.0%); UKIP won 920k (3.1%); and the BNP 564k (1.9%). Yet of the three, the Greens were the only party to win a seat, despite receiving the fewest votes (although this one seat was itself equivalent to only about one sixth of the seats they would have won under a fully proportionate system with that share of the vote).

So, why was this the case, and what does it say about the Greens’ prospects under FPTP?

To win a seat in a multi-way marginal, a party typically needs at least 30%. Caroline Lucas won Brighton Pavilion with 31% of the vote; the next target for the Greens, Norwich South, was won by the Lib Dems with 29%. Other Green targets were won with slightly higher proportions.

Yet, with a lower national share than UKIP and the BNP, explanation is needed for why the Greens were able to mobilise 31% in a particular constituency, while the others were not able to do so.

At least part of the answer is suggested by the huge poll conducted by Michael Ashcroft for the Tories.

A key source for this debate is the question on how likely respondents are to vote for particular parties. A response of 1 signifies that they will definitely not vote for that party, and 10 means that they will definitely vote for that party.

The proportions who say they are extremely likely (let’s say 9 or 10) to vote for each of the three parties is roughly what we’d expect: small, and similar to one another.

But the differences are very interesting when we look lower down the scale:

So both the BNP and UKIP have much more of the electorate fixed against them: 84% and 68% respectively, compared with 55% for the Greens.

If we return to a figure of around 30% needed to win a multi-way marginal constituency, it is clear why this is so hard for the BNP. On a national level, 84% have said they wouldn’t consider voting BNP, leaving very little to play for.

Even for UKIP, to reach 30% of the electorate, the party would need to go all the way down the scale to people who say they are just 3/10 likely to vote UKIP.

Yet for the Greens, winning 30% requires going down only as far as those who are 5/10 likely to vote Green: a much less daunting prospect and a result that suggests that future seats may well be winnable for the Greens.

Just a couple of caveats. Firstly, this makes an assumption of uniform national distributions. Clearly that isn’t the case: it’s an approximate model. Yet, the size of the differences between the parties suggests that it is useful.

Secondly, I’ve treated each party’s scores on these scales in isolation, when that isn’t quite right. A respondent could have said they were 10/10 likely to vote for several parties. What this shows is potential support, not guaranteed support.

For the Greens to win more Westminster seats they would need to take support from the major parties. Given their relatively wide level of latent support, this may be within reach, even under the current electoral rules.

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.

According to the poll, more British adults think that the benefits of climate change will outweigh the risks than are worried about its effects. After a month of glorious spring weather, Brits are now looking forward to global warming, which could bring longer summers, and drier, milder winters.

This could spell an end to stressed families having to take overcrowded budget airline flights to Mediterranean resorts. Instead, improving weather may be about to make holidays at home as popular as they once were, providing a much-needed boost to long-suffering British tourist resorts.

Longer summers will also help the British wine industry. Once seen as the poor relation of traditional European wine producers, British wine may become a familiar sight at dinner parties across the country.

Welcoming the results, Jaime Lannister, head of the research organisation, Climate Change Truth, said “For too long, the country has had to listen to an unrepresentative and self-interested elite who peddle scaremongering myths about climate change. The fact is, there’s no conclusive evidence that humans are causing climate change, and even if any change does happen, it will probably be minor and fairly benign”.

The poll, conducted by Ipsos MORI, also demolishes the claim that Britain is becoming a secular country. Despite the arguments of atheistic scientists like Richard Dawkins, the poll found that more scientists agree that God created the earth and all life in it.

Both stories draw entirely on the same poll: Public Attitudes to Science 2011, published 2 May 2011.  All references to the data are technically accurate but not necessarily meaningful.

For loyal Mail readers, this won’t come as much of a surprise. A couple of months ago the Mail reported a poll that found agreement with climate science in the UK to be lower now than it’s been at any point since the polling began in 2006.

But then for those who read other papers, especially the Guardian, there’s been plenty to suggest that agreement with climate science is still high, and desire for action remains strong. If anything, we might have thought that it’s been growing in recent months.

So are the Mail twisting the facts to fit their expectations, or are they onto something?

In his analysis, Neil at Carbon Brief makes several valid criticisms of the Mail’s interpretation.

The poll asked respondents to identify their top three most important environmental issues, out of a list of 15. This is a long list to choose from, yet “global warming/climate change” was fourth in the UK (on 25%), itself ahead of other urgent and tangible issues like flooding and food supply.

A second point Neil makes is that respondents were asked about environmental issues facing their country “today”. So they are prompted to think both locally and also in terms of issues that are already having an impact. Many people might think that climate change will be an immense crisis in the future, but that its impact is so far relatively unimportant.

In this context perhaps it isn’t surprising that, for example, Indians expressed much greater relative concern about climate change (55% in India) than people in the UK did, since India is already experiencing impacts of climate change, with loss of water supply and flooding of low-lying islands in the Sunderbans. (That said, I’m still a bit surprised with how high this is in India. Perhaps the explanation is in the sample frame: the pollsters only seem to have found 16 people with low levels of education in India: 2% of the sample. They had to weight this up to 41% of the sample to fit with national demographics. I wonder how representative those 16 people really were of national attitudes to climate change among people with lower levels of education.)

To Neil’s points, we could add the criticism that a claim of ‘global warming fatigue’ would require a change in attitudes. This poll doesn’t purport to show any change in attitudes.

So there are good reasons to be wary about the Mail’s analysis.

But for all that, we shouldn’t dismiss entirely the conclusions.

This isn’t the first poll we’ve seen to suggest that Brits are less worried about climate change than are people in many other countries.

An international poll by HSBC found last year that only 8% of those in the UK put climate change as their top concern out of a list of eight issues tested. This was lower than in all but one of the 15 countries tested.

Data from GlobeScan earlier this year also showed that concern in the UK about climate change has fallen significantly since ’07: more than it’s fallen in nearly all of the 14 countries tested.

There are imperfections with each of these polls. None follow the structure I’d use if I designed a test to see the relative concern about climate change internationally (which wouldn’t prompt people with a list drawn up by pollsters living in rich countries). But none are meaningless, and together they build a fairly consistent picture.

Last week we saw that people who have had personal experience of flooding are more concerned about climate change, more likely to believe that it can be stopped, and more willing to take action personally.

Similarly, this new poll has lessons for organisations campaigning on climate change in the UK. The top two environmental issues, above climate change, are “future energy sources and supplies” and “dealing with the amount of waste we generate”.

So this is evidence that some people are more interested in the associated benefits we might gain through action to stop climate change than they are in stopping climate change itself.