Oh, that's gotta hurt

It IS worse than we thought!

Gonna be tough to hide the decline of the percentages who believe in AGW….err…climate chan…….ahhhhhh whaterever!!!

The more interesting thing is the results from those that only allow one answer!!!

Scientific American…….”those were the days my friend…..” that won’t return.

I would have thought that scientific theories, observation and (dare I say it) commonsense, would mean that the first three options would all have to be checked (ticked).
The only question is – how much of climate change to allocate to each factor? Observation of the effects of El Ninos/La Ninas (alone) would indicate that the relative allocations themselves would vary from time to time.

I actually liked it.
And if they continue to do things like that, and publish real (sceptic) science, I would consider reading them as well.

Worse than we thought?

Re percentages. They won’t add up, not I think because they’ve got it wrong, but that a good proportion of those who answered yes to natural processes would also answer yes to solar variation as a subset of natural processes.

The option I would want is “No reliable information available to draw a conclusion.” Given that the majority of the climate science community has defended the publishing of graphs that hide the errors of proxies by replacing proxy temps with thermometer temps, no evidence brought forth by that community can be trusted.
I wonder if anyone is going to do a confirmation of the study by Edward Long, where he compared a rural and urban station in each of the fifty states and found a divergence after about 1960. It doesn’t seem like it would take to long to go over a hundred stations and verify that he didn’t cherry pick. His study seems like an extremely strong indication of error from the urban heat island or similar effect. There seems to be very little discussion of his study on the net. It doesn’t seem to have been debunked either. The study is:
CONTIGUOUS U. S. TEMPERATURE
TRENDS USING NCDC RAW AND
ADJUSTED DATA FOR ONE-PER-STATE
RURAL AND URBAN STATION SETS
by Edward R. Long, Ph.D.
And Anthony, the release of your surfacestations study is taking so long that it is starting to look like you are hiding something. At least give us an update.
REPLY: The paper is written, submitted, and in peer review. We’ll give a full release of data when published. It is out of may hands now, waiting on the journal – Anthony

I assumed that you weren’t limited to one answer to each question

We humans breath out CO2. So do all other animals. Therefore, we and all other animals must die, to “save the planet”.
We are living in an era not matched in history for mass hysteria.

“The results, while interesting, should be taken with a grain of salt.”
That statement could apply to myriad aspects of climate ‘research.’

I can only suggest that the poll was designed by a warmist statistician.

Yeah – isn’t that the fate fashionable ideas…I guess CAGW is going the way of
love and peace;
pet rocks;
long/short hair/skirts;
immanent ice ages;
hope and change;
fill in the blank with any other silly faddish thought fashion: ________________

So in other words, it’s worse than we thought?

LarryOldimer says:
November 5, 2010 at 1:31 pm
We humans breath out CO2. So do all other animals. Therefore, we and all other animals must die, to “save the planet”.
And cows fart Methane, adding insult to injury. I think, therefore, they must die. I’ll be in linwe for the steaks.

But it’s on the internet. It’s gotta be true!

Actually, Anthony, I thought the provision for multiple responses was a strength of this poll. I voted for three of them, because I do believe that both natural process and human agency are involved and I was quire prepared to add solar variability (yes, that too is a natural process and should have been given as an example of natural causes). So the poll did not try to force a false dichotomisation of the causes, which is surely a virtue.
REPLY: I have no trouble with multiple choice, but showing the results in percentages is the wrong way to do it. [per”cent” = fraction of 100] All they needed was the bar graph and totals, or they could have broken up the questions so that the answering process was better defined. – Anthony

Hmm,
So, as a percentage of answers given, we get
21.06
22.77
51.92
4.25
So when attributing climate change, natural variation gets over half. How does such a smart readership put up with that amount of editorial idiocy?

Sorry Anthony, I was out of line to even suggest that you might be hiding something. I just want to see your study so badly that I’m getting frustrated. But I should remember that the reality is that things often go much slower than it seems like they should.
[REPLY – Patience . . . ~ Evan]

So much for Scientific American. A clear demonstration of their scientific prowess.
What will we see next? A big article on how the earth is warming and we are all going to die?
Oops, they already did that.
Bob

I imagine the numbers are homoginized. What you need to see is the raw data and the code used to calculate the results.

Isn’t ‘solar variation’ a member of the set ‘natural influence’?
Scientific American has fallen a long, long way.

How can you be sure that loads of Joe Romm’s readers did not accept his advice?
Perhaps the majority of his readers only go there for a laugh!

actually, aside from the labels on the graph, I’d say that multiple answers is a good polling structure for a question like this. Perhaps “Respondents answering positively” and “percent of respondents answering positively” would have caused less confusion.
Gotta be encouraged by the results, all the same.

I had to look up freep:
http://www.google.ie/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&hs=0bB&rls=org.mozilla:en-GB:official&channel=s&defl=en&q=define:freep&sa=X&ei=YZDUTNKBGcbQ4gbu9vjrBw&ved=0CBQQkAE
“To subject to a mass internet or email assault aimed at pushing a particular point of view”
Disturbing to learn that google is now also a dictionary. Sadly not surprising that Romm was encouraging such childish tomfoolery.
Please add the definition to the article.

Anthony:
I see no problem with the summary of the results as %s. As I am sure you recognize, for questions with multiple responses, the % simply refer to the % of those responding not of all responses. The summary of the results should also separately display the results for those who identified one, two, three of the apparently four options. It would be interesting to know the % of people who attributed the perceived warming to solely greenhouse gases and those who perceived no role for greenhouse gases.
REPLY: Well perhaps it is just the TV reporter in me, but we had a cardinal rule in the newsroom that ANY graphics that went to air or to web using a percentage had to be checked so that there was no math error or entry error and it all added up to 100%. This was particularly true of election season where we might have six candidates for one office and if the % figures didn’t all add up to 100, we’d get calls from all over the place.
I remember well a math teach from a local school calling up and berating one of the neophyte reporters once for just such a gaffe. The poor girl was in tears.
So from my perspective in presenting stats to the public, any graphic where the % of items doesn’t add up to 100% is just asking for trouble. I figure if you design a poll that allows such an presentation “error” to be automatically generated, you need a better poll design. This is the root of the issue here. – Anthony

that poll must be wrong!
Reuters: Despite Electoral Outcomes, Poll Shows Voters Want Clean Economy
By Elizabeth McGowan at SolveClimate
Those findings come from a survey of 1,000 voters who actually cast ballots in 83 battleground House districts nationwide. Washington, D.C.-based Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research conducted the poll Nov. 1 and 2.
When voters who chose the Republican candidate were asked to name their biggest concern about the Democrat, only 1 percent cited an answer related to energy or cap and trade…
“There was no mandate on turning back the clock on environmental protection,” said Heather Taylor-Miesle, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council Action Fund. “Polls galore show continued and strong public support for making continued progress to protect our health and boost our economy.”…
As well, 55 percent of those polled supported a comprehensive energy bill that charges energy companies for carbon emissions but also would limit pollution, invest in domestic energy sources and encourage companies to develop clean energy…
By a 22 percent margin, battleground voters supported the idea of the Environmental Protection Agency tackling global warming by regulating carbon emissions from power plants, vehicles, factories and other sources. The poll showed 58 percent supported the EPA taking such initiative and 36 opposed the idea….
“As sure as the sun rises in the East, America is going to continue moving forward on the clean energy economy and strong environmental protection,” said Anna Aurilio, director of Environment America’s Washington office, about the poll’s results. “The next Congress will have to decide if it is going to be responsive to science, innovation and public support or if it will simply focus on payback to Big Oil and the polluter lobby that funded so many of its campaigns.”
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUS253311316220101105
look – even small business wants action!
June 2010: New Poll Finds Strong Support for Clean Energy Policies Among Small Business Owners
A new bi-partisan poll conducted by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research and American Viewpoint found strong support among small business owners for clean energy and climate legislation…
•61 percent of small business owners agree that moving the country to clean energy is a way to restart the economy and help small businesses create jobs…
http://smallbiztrends.com/2010/06/new-poll-finds-strong-support-for-clean-energy-policies-among-small-business-owners.html
even the Japanese want action!
2009: Reuters: Japanese voters want tough climate goals – survey
WWF and other Japanese and international organisations — which all favour tough climate goals — commissioned the poll of 976 people by U.S.-based Greenberg Quinlan Rosner from May 16 to 25…
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L21005040.htm
surely Sci-Am should get Greenberg Quinlan Rosner to design their next poll.

Does anyone here try to get a comment published over at Climate Progress? I see almost ZERO contrarian views in their comments section.

Since Nature caused mankind to come about, isn’t “anthropogenic” global warming also coming from natural processes?
You might be familiar with the legal reasoning where the maker of a defective device gets the blame for harm the device does rather than the device itself. Yup, old Joe Romm is going to keep at it until Nature regrets not issuing a voluntary recall. He’ll keep going until he gets one too! ☺

The math isn’t so bad since people were free to give more than one answer.
The % is based on the people answering the question, and is not based on the number of answer to the question.

so THAT’S how GISS does it….

I agree that the polling is up the creek.
The first problem is that the options aren’t exclusive. Anybody can choose all or just some. Even when one allows for those selective solar factors recognizing that they should also tick natural, the sums don’t add up at all (just ignore the count of solar) because some respondents probably thought that greenhouse gases also have some effect.
Where’s no way of telling from here how many chose three out of four.
One thing that the poll demonstrates is that SciAm doesn’t know how to construct a poll that produces meaningful results.

Anthony…I’d quibble a bit with your heartburn over multiple response questions. I’ve used them in some settings. Yes, you are correct that the poll was sloppy…for example, I looked at the original survey form and the question did not even state “choose as many as you think are relevant” (or something)….the only indication was a check box instead of a radio button (which is the forced choice format)
The summary was very poor. But this is not an election. Yes, it would be horrible to go on the air with something that should add up to 100 percent but doesn’t. My favorite is the cume chart that starts sloping down somewhere in the middle.
If properly explained….like “here’s the percentage of people who find the following factor important in climate change” there is information to be had.
Still better would be for the respondent to assign weights….but that would be hard for survey monkey

I reject completely the notion that the sun is part of natural variation. The sun is a nuclear device and as such is under strict regulation by the United Nations, the International Atomic Energy Agency to be specific. A considerable number of communities in fact have declared themselves nuclear free zones, though admittedly this was mostly about banning nuclear missiles (hence the signs erected at airports to prevent them from landing). Given the proven, robust, and obvious effectiveness of the United Nations in general (consider the fine work of, for example, of the IPCC, programs like Food For Oil, and the leadership demonstrated in the battle for women’s rights being chaired by Iran) the notion that there is any variability in the sun not carefully monitored and controlled by the UN is just nonsense, and anyone who says otherwise doesn’t understand science. All you have to do to prove it to yourself is look at all the IPCC models that don’t even include solar variation as a variable. If its not in the models, it obviously isn’t a factor. Sheesh, just read the reports! The proof is right there!

davidmhoffer says:
November 5, 2010 at 10:37 pm
=======================
LOL…….LOL……LOL
Chris

Well, one question if I recall correctly asked how much effort/money we needed to devote to stopping climate change.
The last option was ‘Whatever it takes.’
It was the only possible answer – so shrouded in ambiguity since ‘Whatever it takes’ could range from ‘absolutely nothing’ to ten years worth of sackcloth and ashes and abstinence from all that feels and tastes good.

If you add the ‘human activity’ responses to the ‘natural causes’ responses there is an excess of about 328 which is close to the number of ‘no climate change’ responses….

Some new titles for Joe Romm:
Freeperman
The Grim Freeper

That graph at the beginning looks exactly like the the graph for heat absorption of gaseous CO2. Now there’s a coincidence

I’m puzzled why more folk here don’t appreciate the virtues of this poll. Sure, as science it’s a nonstarter. But it does reflect real swathes of public opinion, as one reads them in so many columns of readers’ comments where it’s plain the readers know far more, and are fairer and wiser, than the author of the article did or was. Moreover I think it was done with tongue in cheek. And surely it signals a real move in the skeptics direction from the NS op-eds and Mannian complain-o-logues we’ve seen even recently. Look at what SciAm readers now think:
1. Should climate scientists discuss scientific uncertainty in mainstream forums? (resoundingly )Yes, it would help engage the citizenry.
2. Judith Curry is: (resoundingly) a peacemaker.
3. What is causing climate change? (clearly) natural processes.
4. The IPCC, or Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is: (resoundingly) a corrupt organization, prone to groupthink, with a political agenda.
5. What should we do about climate change? (clearly) Nothing, we are powerless to stop it.
6. What is “climate sensitivity”? (good majority) an unknown variable that climate scientists still do not understand.
7. Which policy options do you support? (good majority) keeping science out of the political process.
I’ve been waiting years to see this commonsense returning.

Carrick says: “It is erroneous that the sum of all of the columns should add to 100% before one can use percentages.”
Your point may be technically correct, but it is extremely misleading if they don’t. First impressions matter – people will look at a column containing a percentage and assume all of the items add to 100%.
When presenting comparisons, results should account for the entire sample. Even if one of the items is something like “no opinion”.
Bernie and sylvian say: “the % simply refer to the % of those responding”
Then there should be two columns containing % agree and % disagree. The bars should be presented in similar fashion. The two will then add up to 100% and the presentation will start to make sense.
I agree with Anthony 110% on this one!

Just so everyone knows.
A percentage can be based on the number of respondents OR the number of responses; i.e., N = responses or respondents.
When multiple selections are allowed on a poll question, the percentages reported should always be with reference to the number of responses (not respondents) and it should be made clear which it is on each question. What this means is that the percentages should add up to 100% for each question no matter how the question is asked (single response or multiple responses per question).
Now, if the individual percentages don’t add up to 100% for each question, it is an ERROR–usually by the programmer who implemented the poll on the Internet. The person who calculated the statistical percentages obviously used the “number of respondents” as the denominator on each question rather than the number of responses as he/she should have done. It was a common mistake caused by someone who, in a hurry, divided everything by the number of respondents. What is amazing to me is that no one at Scientific American caught the error.

Ideally, you ought to give the percentage giving each response and combination of responses separately.
e.g.
A: 40%
B: 45%
A and B: 10%
Neither: 5%
Instead of:
A: 50%
B: 55%
Although I can’t believe anyone is really taking this seriously.

This reminds me of a humourous sketch by the Chasers,

(well the bit 50 seconds in), and I think their statistics bureaus are very similar. Still, we should recognise this poll for what it is, an overwhelming proof that the consensus of the public is on our side no matter how they skew the presentation or results.

Ditto what Lucy said.
But what’s the meta-message here? Is SciAm engaged in exploratory self-correction? Is this a prelude to a CAGW flip-flop? If you were publisher, and saw your revenues decreasing and profits disappearing and sensed that your readership was deserting you, what would you do? We know they have eschewed real science for quite some time. This effort was political in every sense, not a return to science. Because that’s a touchy subject: if SciAm admits returning to science, then where have they been?

Aynsley Kellow — and Anthony’s reply, concerning multiple answers to poll questions:
In my view the reporting of outcomes to such a question is deceptive in any case unless answers are reported in grouped form. Nominally, since there are 4 binary choices there are 2^4 = 16 potential answers, though one would think any combining the fourth option with any of the first three are nonsense. Still I would be interested in the number selecting the last two. Persons who did this would be quite distinct from those selecting the first three, although both groups would contribute to option 3 in the statistics they reported here.