Stanford and Woods Institute didn’t like the recent polls like these:
Pew poll: 2 of 3 Americans think Congressional action on climate change is not a priority
Gallup: Americans’ Global Warming Concerns Continue to Drop
Pew Poll: global warming dead last, down from last year
So with public money from the National Science Foundation, they conducted their own poll, and issued a press release:
Large majority of Americans still believe in global warming, Stanford poll finds
Three out of four Americans believe that the Earth has been gradually warming as the result of human activity and want the government to institute regulations to stop it, according to a new survey by researchers at the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University.
The survey was conducted by Woods Institute Senior Fellow Jon Krosnick, a professor of communication and of political science at Stanford, with funding from the National Science Foundation. The results are based on telephone interviews conducted from June 1-7 with 1,000 randomly selected American adults.
“Several national surveys released during the last eight months have been interpreted as showing that fewer and fewer Americans believe that climate change is real, human-caused and threatening to people,” Krosnick said. “But our new survey shows just the opposite.”
For example, when respondents in the June 2010 survey were asked if the Earth’s temperature probably had been heating up over the last 100 years, 74 percent said yes. And 75 percent said that human behavior was substantially responsible for any warming that has occurred. Krosnick has asked similar questions in previous Woods Institute polls since 2006.
“Our surveys reveal a small decline in the proportion of people who believe global warming has been happening, from 84 percent in 2007 to 74 percent today,” Krosnick said. “Statistical analysis of our data revealed that this decline is attributable to perceptions of recent weather changes by the minority of Americans who have been skeptical about climate scientists.”
In terms of average Earth temperature, 2008 was the coldest year since 2000, Krosnick said. “Scientists say that such year-to-year fluctuations are uninformative, and people who trust scientists therefore ignore this information when forming opinions about global warming’s existence,” he added. “But people who do not trust climate scientists base their conclusions on their personal observations of nature. These ‘low-trust’ individuals were especially aware of the recent decline in average world temperatures; they were the ones in our survey whose doubts about global warming have increased since 2007.”
According to Krosnick, this explanation is especially significant, because it suggests that the recent decline in the proportion of people who believe in global warming is likely to be temporary. “If the Earth’s temperature begins to rise again, these individuals may reverse course and rejoin the large majority who still think warming is real,” he said.
‘Climategate’
Several questions in the June survey addressed the so-called “climategate” controversy, which made headlines in late 2009 and early 2010.
“Growing public skepticism has, in recent months, been attributed to news reports about e-mail messages hacked from the computer system at the University of East Anglia in Britain – characterized as showing climate scientists colluding to silence unconvinced colleagues – and by the discoveries of alleged flaws in reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPPC),” Krosnick said. “Our survey discredited this claim in multiple ways. ”
For example, only 9 percent of respondents said they knew about the East Anglia e-mail messages and believed they indicate that climate scientists should not be trusted, and only 13 percent said the same about the controversial IPPC reports.
“Overall, we found no decline in Americans’ trust in environmental scientists,” Krosnick said. “Fully 71 percent of respondents said they trust scientists a moderate amount, a lot or completely.”
Government solutions
In the June 2010 survey, 86 percent of respondents said they wanted the federal government to limit the amount of air pollution that businesses emit, and 76 percent favored government limitations on greenhouse gas emissions generated by businesses. Only 14 percent said that the United States should not take action to combat global warming unless other major industrial countries like China and India do so as well.
Among other survey results:
- 78 percent opposed taxes on electricity to reduce consumption, and 72 percent opposed taxes on gasoline;
- 84 percent favored the federal government offering tax breaks to encourage utilities to make more electricity from water, wind and solar power;
- Four out of 5 respondents favored government requiring or offering tax breaks to encourage the production of cars that use less gas (81 percent), appliances that use less electricity (80 percent) and homes and office buildings that require less energy to heat and cool (80 percent);
- Only 18 percent said that policies to reduce global warming would increase unemployment.
For additional information on Krosnick’s research, visit: http://woods.stanford.edu/research/surveys.html
“It is sad to see that Global warming is in the bottom list of the priorities. I hope people will at least be more concerned with the environment.”
Tim…..AGW is exactley where it should be. As to your second “hope”, anybody with more than 2 active brain cells ARE concerned about the enviroment. Problem is,the two are NOT connected. One is a socialist scheme to transfer wealth,the other is a legit concern about pollution,garbage,smart use of our resources,etc.
These are the most deadly critiques of the survey, IMO.
Little Bo Warning has lost her Warming, and doesn’t know where to find it.
Must be hiding somewhere.
krazykiwi wrote,
“I’d like to see the questions and interview script”
The questions are in the study report, along with a straightforward description of the sampling. For anyone confused about the survey’s date and sampling methods (emphasis added):
“The Stanford Global Warming Poll was conducted by GfK Roper Public Affairs & Corporate Communications – a division of GfK Custom Research North America – for Stanford University. This telephone poll is based on a nationally-representative probability sample of 1,000 adults age 18 or older.
The interviews were conducted June 1st – June 7th, 2010, with 699 respondents on landlines and 301 on cellular telephones. Both the landline and cell phone samples were provided by Survey Sampling International. The survey sample included the contiguous 48 states, Alaska and Hawaii. Interviews were conducted in both English and Spanish. The combined landline and cell phone data were weighted to account for probabilities of selection, as well as age, sex, education and race, using targets from the March 2009 supplement of the Current Population Survey. In addition to these factors, the weighting takes into account the patterns of land and cell phone usage by region from the 2009 Fall estimates provided by Mediamark Research Inc.” http://woods.stanford.edu/docs/surveys/Global-Warming-Survey-Selected-Results-June2010.pdf
It’s fair to critique the questions’ wording (I would!). But many posters, giving no evidence, accuse the researchers of lying about the sample. Such accusations amount to making up “facts” to fit your prejudices, exactly what they assume someone else does.
Ken Hall wrote,
“This could mean that they have a ‘pool’ of 10,000 people who they know already lean towards the climate alarmist view and they ‘randomly’ selected a thousand from that pool.”
tony K wrote,
“When real science and observations failed …. pay some pollsters to make up some majority percentage of the populace to back your side.”
Doug wrote,
“I fail to see how this survey can possibly take into account shifts in public opinion post ‘Climategate’, ‘Glaciergate’ etc. considering when these various ‘…gates’ came to pass.”
Adolf Balik wrote,
“The random selection of their respondents was conducted on base of their Green activist lists.”
Jeremy wrote,
“Modern science is rotten to the core. Totally corrupt. These institutions should be torn down. They are mostly running a Ponzi scheme built on fabricated & manipulated results and alarmist propaganda.”
Cassandra King wrote,
“Of course we have to take their word for it that the one thousand people were actually random and not taken from a greepeace donation rosta.”
Pamela Gray wrote,
“So, it sounds like the questions were worded like:
Do you think, like, maybe, the temps like have been warming, possibly, in the, like, last 100, like, years or so?”
Ray wrote,
“They simply used the MST Method (Mann Statistical Trick) and eliminated all samples that did not comply with their predetermined final result.”
And Juraj V. started this thread off with a hate note,
“Mr Krosnick, go choke yourself.”
I would be interested to see what Sphaerica wrote to need censorship by the mod, unlike this post wishing someone would die for saying reporting a survey you don’t like.
I’m afraid you’re correct. However, the two critiques I quoted above seem solid, and they cut the poll’s findings down to near-insignificance.
I read the OpEd in the NYT yesterday but could see no link to the actual poll.
Went back today and there it was.
Can anyone out there tell me if the article was changed and the information inserted at a later date?
peterhodges says:
June 10, 2010 at 11:35 am
“But people who do not trust climate scientists base their conclusions on their personal observations of nature.” –
that about sums it up.
For the simple-minded, maybe. For anyone paying attention, and with more than two brain cells to rub together, there are are a whole host of reasons not to trust climate scientists.
I would feel better about this poll if they had showed the results to all of the questions. Call me simple, but when someone is hiding something, I assume they have something to hide.
I say this because they have only reported about 20% of the results. The lowest question number in their “Selected Results” is Q1 (Question 1), and the highest is Q54. So I’d assume that there were 54 questions. Of these, they reported:
Q1
Q12 (twice)
Q14 (twice)
Q19a
Q33b (twice)
Q36
Q36b
Q36c
Q51
Q52
Q53
Q54
So out of the minimum number of 54 questions, they have reported the results from a whopping 12 of them, and inflated the apparent number by reporting three of them twice … bad pollsters, no cookies.
(In fact, there are more questions, since we are also missing at a minimum Q19b, Q33a, and Q36a.)
Like I say, this doesn’t indicate that their poll is bogus … but it sure ups the odds. In any case, without access to the questions, the poll is meaningless.
When
she was’ critiquing the questions wording’, not the questioner.
Look at the start of the question I chose You may have heard about the idea…….. The terms ‘probably’ and ‘You may have heard about the the idea’….etc would not cut the mustard with WUWT readers, we could be very specific, but a lay audience ‘may’ have heard of a lot of things via the MSM and be lulled into giving an answer that this particular questioner intended to be given. I would say that the chummy, laid back questioning style was deliberate.
Willis Eschenbach June 11, 2010 at 5:07 pm
A bit like the U Illinois survey then, reporting two questions only and remaining strangely coy about seven others. Strange that the reported questions were so basic that the role of CO2 had not even been addressed, and to targetted Earth Scientists no less.
The warming alarmists have been repeatedly shown to be dishonest and corrupt. They have an agenda to push and they conduct their research to push that agenda. They have been compromised and copted by the environmentalists who desire to return the USA to the stone age. When science becomes politicized it is no longer science. The four corners of deceit in the universe of lies are academia, government, media, and science.