Climate Sock

A nice little paper was published last month in Nature Climate Change, which needs to be taken seriously by anyone campaigning on climate change.

The paper draws on the 2010 poll by the Understanding Risk Group, and shows that “those who report experience of flooding express more concern over climate change, see it as less uncertain and feel more confident that their actions will have an effect on climate change”, and that “these perceptual differences also translate into a greater willingness to save energy to mitigate climate change”.

That is, people who’ve had first-hand experience of something that could be attributed to climate change, care more about it and are more willing to act to stop it.

The difference in views between those who’d experienced flooding and those who hadn’t is clear:

Firstly, on the question, “How concerned, if at all, are you about climate change, sometimes referred to as ‘global warming’?”

And secondly, on the questions: ‘I can personally help to reduce climate change by changing my behaviour’; ‘I am uncertain that climate change is really happening’; and ‘My local area is likely to be affected by climate change’:

(Reproduced with permission)

Nowhere is the gap vast, but it’s always statistically significant. The message is clear: personal experience of the impact of extreme weather makes people more likely to think that climate change is worth tackling, and that it can be tackled.

All of which is a pretty clear lesson for anyone campaigning on climate change.

But a selection of campaigning videos raises questions about this:

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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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As expected, we’ve started seeing a flurry of polls on attitudes to nuclear power, post-earthquake. For now I’m going to focus on the UK polls, though there look to be a lot of non-UK polls too, and I’ll try to cover those soon.

Two have come out in the last few days: a YouGov/Sunday Times poll, which included a few questions on nuclear among other issues; and a poll commissioned by Friends of the Earth, and conducted by GfK NOP.  On the latter, just because it’s commissioned by a group who’re campaigning on the issue, doesn’t mean there’s anything dodgy about it. They’ve been good enough to release the data, and there doesn’t strike me as anything leading or suspicious about it, particularly the first question (which is the only one I’m using here).

Two things stand out from the polls:

1. Support for nuclear energy has fallen, but not dramatically

No surprises that support for nuclear energy has fallen.  I was a little surprised, though, by the relatively small size of the drop in support for building nuclear plants to replace those that are being phased out.

Before the earthquake, Mori in November last year found 47% support / 19% opposition.  Now, we see 35% support / 28% opposition in the GfK NOP poll (the YouGov poll had no equivalent question).

Putting this in context of the last few years, it only takes support for nuclear energy down to the level it was at in late ‘07. And while it’s fallen significantly since late last year, there’s still a majority in favour of replacement.

2. Men and women have very different attitudes

It’s not often that you see an issue so divided on gender lines as these polls show attitudes to nuclear power to be.

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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:

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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:

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Mid-way through last year, there was a series of articles and discussions about how climate campaigners could be more effective at promoting their message in an environment where they seemed to be under more attack than ever before.

A sense of the concern at the time comes across from articles like Bob Ward’s piece in New Scientist (behind a paywall, though I wrote about it here) and Guy Shrubsole’s article on Left Foot Forward.  The latter refers to Oxfam’s analysis of how the Climategate claims were spread by people who don’t believe in climate science, which formed another part of the discussions. Some of the intensity may have ebbed slightly (at least this is my sense), but nothing fundamentally has changed.

One of my conclusions from these conversations was that there was a real need for an organisation that was both an online hub and a communications unit that  reacts quickly and effectively to stories that affect public perceptions of climate change.  Although Climategate may not have had much direct impact on public attitudes towards climate change, it certainly demonstrated that there are few people ready and willing to react to breaking stories about climate change in order to help journalists to get the accurate information they need.

It may be that this is beginning to change – enter Carbon Brief. Launched this week, for now it’s small, but it’s mission is potentially very influential. According to the website, Carbon Brief fact-checks stories about climate science online and in the press. We provide briefings on the people and organisations talking about climate change, and we produce background materials on science issues and news stories.

If they build a name for themselves, and become a key contact for journalists throughout the media (not just the friendly ones), as well as a resource for bloggers, Carbon Brief could be very interesting to keep watching.

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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GlobeScan have recently been trailing this year’s results for their annual global tracker, which has prompted a bit of a geekout in Climatesockland.  These guys at GlobeScan seriously mean business with their tracker: they’re now up to 27 countries, including some places where fieldwork for a nationally representative poll takes quite a bit of organising (I dread to think how you would do a truly nationally representative poll in Indonesia for example, but so they claim to have done).

The good news, poll fans, is that those nice people at GlobeScan have sent me some of the data that they hadn’t previously published (unlike the PR polls that are so irritatingly reported without any published data to back them up, this was a piece of private polling, so GlobeScan weren’t governed by the rules of the British Polling Council to release the data).

And from even this relatively small bit of data, we see something interesting:

That looks to me like a significant fall in concern about climate change between ’09 and ’10 that seems to be felt across the world.

This would seem to challenge the usual explanations for the fall in the UK of concern about climate change between late ’09 and early ’10. A particularly cold winter can’t possibly be the explanation for this given that ’10 seems to have been one of the hottest years on record globally.

Similarly, it’s very hard to believe that the UEA emails (and other challenges to climate science) made enough of a splash in all of these countries to have driven these changes.

If we go back to earlier data, and look at changes from ’07 to ’10, we see a slightly different picture:

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I never set out to pick on the nuclear industry. For one, they’ve got ready access to capital and probably know where to find a man who could administer a hearty dose of polonium.  But as I’m in the habit of writing about public attitudes to the environment and such, I’ve found it hard not to notice that the British nuclear industry seems to have a particular enthusiasm for polling.

To take a six-month period last year: in May, EDF had YouGov do a poll about different energy sources. A few months later, EDF commissioned more polling, this time among the population living near the Hinkley Point Power Station in Somerset .

Then, just two months after EDF’s latest poll, the British Nuclear Industry Association joined in the fun, with the latest wave of their own annual poll, covering, yep, attitudes towards nuclear power.

As with the earlier polls, the results are reasonably good for advocates of nuclear power. People in general are not overwhelmingly hostile to the prospect of building new power stations, either as replacements for existing ones (47% support, 19% oppose), or as additions to the current capacity (40% support, 23% oppose). When nuclear is included as part of the energy mix (along with renewable) as many as 69% will go along with it.

Probably most encouraging for the industry is that this new poll shows support for new power stations (as replacements) at its highest level since they began polling in 2001:

That said, we’ve seen in previous polls (covered here) that when compared with attitudes to other energy sources, nuclear performs much worse:

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