I have three thoughts on this. 1. Like Lewandowsky, they didn’t bother to get opinions from the most central collection of climate skeptics in the world, WUWT. But reading the article, I think they really mean ‘people are more ambivalent than we thought’, which is what many public surveys have shown us about climate change opinion. 2. As our detractors are fond of pointing out with paleo and surface temperature studies, one country (Norway) is not representative of the world. 3. The picture provided of the researchers, oozes ambivalence. At least it’s not these clowns.
Using a brand new survey method, researchers in Bergen have asked a broad spectrum of people in Norway about their thoughts on climate change. The answers are quite surprising.
Some 2,000 Norwegians have been asked about what they think when they hear or read the words “climate change”. There were no pre-set answers or “choose the statement that best describes your view” options. Instead the respondents had to formulate their views on climate change in their own words. The answers have provided striking new insight into what the average person on the street in Norway thinks about climate change.
“The way we formulate the questions ensures that the respondents give more nuanced answers. We see, for example, that many of the people who might otherwise have stated they doubt that climate change is due to human activity make provisos and say that some changes probably are caused by human activity when they are given the opportunity to respond in their own words. Climate-change sceptics are thus more ambivalent than has been suggested in previous surveys,” says Endre Tvinnereim, a researcher at Uni Research Rokkan Centre.
Language analysis
The respondents were drawn from the Norwegian Citizen Panel, and the survey is part of the LINGCLIM project at the University of Bergen. This project is looking at the language used and the interpretations that prevail in the climate-change debate.
The survey was carried out in 2013 as an online questionnaire. This kept the costs down, making it possible to collect data from a sample pool of respondents.
Published in Nature
The researchers analysed the results, and the study has now been published in the highly respected journal Nature Climate Change. Very few researchers in the social sciences and humanities manage to get their research published there. However, the study by researcher Tvinnereim and Professor Kjersti Fløttum at the University of Bergen is arousing interest.
The researchers divided the answers they received into four categories using the text analysis method Structural Topic Modelling (STM). These are the four main topics that Norwegians associate with climate change:
- Weather and ice
Focus on the physical consequences of climate change such as unstable weather and melting ice
- The future and consequences for man
For example, risks and challenges that will affect their children and grandchildren
- Money and consumption
References to negative effects of the consumer society, the need to help poor countries, statements related to politics, issues related to economic motives behind climate policy
- Causes
What is causing climate change? The impact of human activity.
Views are often balanced in that the participants believe that both nature and human activities affect the climate
A single respondent could give answers that belong to several categories. The researchers got the most responses in the category “weather and ice”. In second place came the “the future and consequences”, followed by “money and consumption” and finally “causes”.
Gender differences
Slightly more women responded that they thought about things related to “weather and ice” than men. Otherwise, there were no differences between the sexes.
Nor were there significant differences in the responses between people with different educational backgrounds.
“Previous studies have shown that people with lower education are more sceptical about climate change than people with higher education. We did not observe any such correlation in our survey. Education had little impact on what people chose to attach importance to,” says Tvinnereim.
Major differences related to age
One aspect where we did find major differences was the respondents’ age. The older the respondent was, the less concerned he/she was about the “future and consequences”; the younger respondents tended to have a large proportion of their answers in the category “future and consequences”.
“We see that the older respondents write more about weather and ice and are less focused on the future in their responses,” says Tvinnereim. This may be because climatology focused more on physical aspects in the past, whereas now there is more talk about solutions and consequences for society. It may also be because older people do not have so much time left and are therefore less worried about the future, apart from when they think about their children and grandchildren.
“From the perspective of the LINGCLIM project, this study draws a representative picture of the diversity of opinions and attitudes that exist among people regarding climate change. The study clearly shows how the language used in the climate debate affects public opinion and how language is interpreted and reproduced by the general public in Norway. Our results thus provide important contributions to the knowledge base needed to make relevant decisions on actions,” says Professor Kjersti Fløttum at the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Bergen.
New questions
The researchers now want to use this same method in other projects in order to obtain more in-depth knowledge about what people really think and believe.
“It will be interesting and important to use this method to investigate new issues and in more countries. For me as a linguist, it will also be important to analyse the material we have in greater depth and investigate variations in the freely formulated answers provided by the respondents. Climate change appears to be associated with everything from physical realities to people’s subjective attitudes, values and interests,” says Fløttum.
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They are getting warmer at least, but they need to dig a lot deeper. Then they would find that skeptics/climate realists are not “ambivalent”, but rather more knowledgable about climate and about the issue of manmade climate.
I am “ambivalent” but lack adequate information to become monovalent. Where I am skeptical is that I doubt anyone else has that information.
Monovalent? Containing only one kind of antibody? I hope you meant malevolent..as that would be far more clever/appropriate. 🙂
The only man made climate I’m aware of is in actual greenhouses!
PeterinMD
June 3, 2015 at 9:58 am
The only man made climate I’m aware of is in actual greenhouses!
———————————————————————————————————-
Seems your typical HVAC system is referred to as “Climate Control”, no?
“The survey was carried out in 2013 as an online questionnaire.”
I wonder how different the answers would be now in June 2015?:
http://theforeigner.no/pages/news-in-brief/june-snow-stranded-39/
Ref from::
http://iceagenow.info/2015/06/norway-snow-driver-never-experienced-anything-like-this-before/
I notice they use “climate change” and not “global warming” in their survey.
Mr. Peterson, I always ask: Is this climate change your are talking about due to global warming or to global cooling? I get such looks!
Deep down they are afraid of changes and love free money too much.
More Norway weather:
http://www.newsinenglish.no/2015/06/02/january-in-june-strands-drivers/
have asked a broad spectrum of people in Norway about their thoughts on climate change…..
…..The study clearly shows how the language used in the climate debate affects public opinion
and asking questions about “climate change” somehow doesn’t bias the answers
The dumbing down of academia
Yes. It appears so.
That it might surprise many climate change crusaders is surprising; it does not surprise many independent critical thinkers engaged in applied reasoning.
John
Norway is rich because of fossil fuels.
Along with the fossil fuel riches came the limousine liberal disease called “hypocrisy.”
Look at how they try to shape their depictions of their political rivals. So, skeptics don’t say that its all one thing, like Co2, as the warmists’ do. We recognize that there are more factors than just one gas. That makes us “ambivalent?” Our uncertainty is based upon the knowledge that we don’t know everything about climate like the true believers in CAGW. We have minds that can see more than one side of an issue. Thank you for pointing that out.
The study does have flaws and questionable methodology. However it’s fundamentally flaw is that it assumes climate changing is inevitably catastrophic. The study is inherently biased, it’s like asking someone, “When did you stop beating your wife”. Or in this case suggesting, “How do you feel about humanity and/or nature destroying climate, the earth and you?”
Whats funny is out of the four categories, the category that received the least response was “causes”. This suggests a lack of confidence in specifying the cause of climate change. In this light the public shows more common sense than climate scientists.
Alx, you’ve misunderstood, I believe. The study did not suggest the categories, nor ask a biased question. The categories come from analysis of the responses.
As Steveta said, it was a blank form. I think what this shows is that laypersons are not well educated about causes. Even I would have a hard time doing more than handwaving over the dozens of overlaying cycles before coming down hard on the small amount predicted and its trivial effects.
They receive money for this.
When I have used that sentence in the past it had a question mark and an exclamation mark at the end. Sometimes I would write “WTF??!!” after it. As I come across more and more of these kinds of studies I am no longer incredulous. The sentence is now just a depressing statement of fact.
OK, now we see where they are coming from. What is interesting is that they are allowing natural factors to come into the debate, which they has not done before. We could be cynical and say that they are trying to pull more support for the warmist position allowing 10%, or 25% man-made. Such a counting up could be useful politically, I suppose. But all of this is just an assertion about motives, best to be careful.
But there is a much larger point to be made here. Consider this post, which appeared here several days ago.
Claim: Data does not prove that climate models are wrong
The commenters missed on this one big-time. The central claim was that the climate models cannot be proved wrong because natural variability was swamping out the anthropogenic effect.
Exactly:
It was not long ago that making the claim of significant natural effects is just exactly what got so many of us the label Denier in the first place. The authors then used one of the sceptics fundamental positions in support of the models. The paper is heresy, the authors are heretics.
Now we see this, natural variability explicitly included in a study and the study makes it into Nature Climate Change, a bastion of the warmists. There is a sea-change happening in the terms of the debate. Possibly the warmists, after denying natural variability for so long, are attempting to co-opt it for their own use.
Thanks, Anthony.
I’m guessing this study wants to show the lack of conviction, the skepticism of skeptics about our own position.
Some of us are skeptics because we are scientific-minded, some just reject imposed thinking. We know that the only “settled science” is bad science.
I take it they conclude that there are in fact very few “Deniers”out there (at least in Norway) and that most people have something of an each way bet on account of they are a bit like dogs watching tennis and know something is happening but it is not that clear what. Obviously the CAGW crowd do not seem to be making such an impact. Most people these days are well aware of the smell and sound of spin and while aware it is there don’t afford it much credit. Since there is much more CAGW spin out there than skeptical stuff let aalone genuine denierism it seems the CAGW lot are not really being listened to.
‘It may also be because older people do not have so much time left and are therefore less worried about the future …’
I think not. I think maybe, just maybe, it’s because older people have seen all this nonsense before in their lives.
More likely their concerns stem from how ice and/or flooding might affect them personally in the near future. Physical injuries and things that might restrict access to food, medical care etc. become top priorities for the elderly. Falling on ice or being trapped by flood waters ARE catastrophic to old people, and clearly more likely than their grandchildren suffering from imaginary catastrophic warming of some kind.
definitions are critical.
“Climate change” is, by intention, dishonest term intended to deceive.
When one makes the decision to “find the right balance between honesty and effectiveness”, that marks you as a scheming liar, and nothing else you say can be viewed as untainted.
Reading through this, I dont see anything wrong with the conclusions. I suspect if you renamed the subject to climate change alarmism, you would get the identical results. The study seems to produce nothing at all new or unexpected. I just dont see why it was worthy of study to discover that when people actually think about something rather than react viscerally there thoughts are a little more nuanced.
“Previous studies have shown that people with lower education are more sceptical about climate change than people with higher education.”
What studies? The only study I know of that addressed that topic found that skeptics are more educated about climate science.
Kahan, Dan (2015) Expressive Rationality and Cultural Polarization: Theory and Evidence, Advances in Political Psychology, Vol 2,
Paywalled
“Nature Climate Change | Letter
Explaining topic prevalence in answers to open-ended survey questions about climate change”
New models preying on common colloquial language; forcing into climate researcher thinking contraints.
News Flash!
Only skeptics can be ambivalent… According to the new word models. Alarmists are always, er, solid believers.
Sloppy science.
Soggy project structure.
Confirmation bias.
News announcements without any real science practiced.
Nature did not publish a research paper, they published someone’s idea of a soft social science high school project.
See link from Lance Wallace above for non-paywalled version
Lance Wallace published links to the data, not the letter published in Nature.
Seeing the data is nice, but it’s just data without their conclusions and alleged rationale.
Paul Matthews correctly noted the article was posted above:
“Lance Wallace June 3, 2015 at 8:17 am
Jeff Glassman–
Sorry, when I click on the link I get to the full article, I guess because I am using my institutional access.
Here is the article on Dropbox.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/75831381/Tvinnereim%20and%20Flottum%20survey%20of%20Norwegian%20ideas%20on%20climate%20change.pdf“
Thank you A. Scott. That is not what I found at the other links.
Reading…
Addendum to my comment above:
Looks to be an instructional on how not to achieve a proper fully representative sample.
What’s a blender full of weighting amongst friends.
From the combined waves 1-3.
Combined waves 1 & 2 were listed as having 69% response. Given that they started with a potential sample size of 25,000 people, 69% response ratio is optimistic.
Variables defined for where responses fit:
Dissect 21,470 words from 10,510 people into 1,529 variables as weighted results; and only skeptics are ambivalent?
Smells like confirmation bias.
Rather off piste, but my tourist brother Andrew’s postcard from Bergen arrived this morning in which he reports they’ve had ‘the worst May for many years’.
Piste?? OK really OT response: which weapon?
It should be noted that Norway is a major European player in weather enhancement and research technology.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EISCAT
Open ended questions, whether in climate science or any other political area, tends to produce more nuanced answers. The answers reflect a mulling over in one’s mind, the question. There are more caveats to the answer.
The fall down in most analysis of the answers lies in the ascribing motivations for an answer. That is, young people’s: “the younger respondents tended to have a large proportion of their answers in the category “future and consequences”. To establish that the motivations of younger people regarding climate change are more than what younger people already have as a future oriented perspective would need to be established. That is, younger people’s concern for the future as it relates to climate change is Greater Than their usual concern about the future. As it is, young people are busy preparing for the future through education, skills acquisition, having families, etc. Having a future orientation is the expected norm. How much more concerned about the future are young people regarding climate change? This is open to interpretation in this study.
For the elderly: “We see that the older respondents write more about weather and ice and are less focused on the future in their responses,” says Tvinnereim. This may be because climatology focused more on physical aspects in the past, whereas now there is more talk about solutions and consequences for society.” I am afraid that Mr. Tvinnereim misses the obvious. The elderly are concerned about the practicality of weather and not climate change. Do I need to wear a rain coat? Is the ice cleared from the sidewalk? The elderly have lived long enough to know that the climate will be whatever the climate will be and one has to adapt to the immediacy of the weather.
The next questionnaire should look at motivation; i.e., why do you say what you said? as well as giving a scale to the answer: are you concerned more about climate change than about getting that new job? The motivation questions provide context to the answers on climate change; unless of course, you don’t really want to know that climate change is not really on your mind most of the time, if at all.
‘highly respected journal Nature Climate Change.’
A journal whose very existence depends in CAGW , and therefore respect is by no means a given.
And your left with the feeling that any who do not running around like chicken little screaming about ‘climate doom ‘ are consider “ambivalent” where as it more likley they consider that after consideration there is simply no good reason to in the first place.
“This may be because climatology focused more on physical aspects in the past, whereas now there is more talk about solutions and consequences for society. It may also be because older people do not have so much time left and are therefore less worried about the future, apart from when they think about their children and grandchildren.”
Amazing that they never addressed the fact that older people can actually remember when the weather/climate was as bad or worse than during recent events that are being called “unprecedented”.
Superstorm Sandy in 2012 for instance. Any old codger living in that area that remembers 1954, knows this same type of storm happened in Oct 1954. They may not have understood the reasons but the atmospheric set up was the same with Hurricane Hazel
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Hazel
In 1954, this came after 2 cat. 3 hurricanes had hit the same general region in the previous 2 months.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_Atlantic_hurricane_season
You’d have to be well into your 80’s to actually remember the Dust Bowl Decade in the 1930’s but the more time that passes since it occurred, the less it will be remembered. Without a doubt the oldest generation can tell you much more about it than the younger ones.
Very people form opinions on climate change based on being experts on atmospheric science. Very few people are experts on science to the extent that they would be able to understand enough about climate science to have the correct scientific opinion……………..heck, I’ve been an operational meteorologist for 33 years, observing the atmosphere all day long and studying weather and climate constantly but some of my views are much different than what is represented as the mainstream climate science view.
For most people, on many issues, including climate science they interpret new information based on a combination of things that include their belief system. Their belief system has slowly been carved out over the years based on experiences, memories, education and learning experiences.
Older people have acquired far more of the above. Of course this can mean that they are not giving proper weighting to the last 2 decades because they grew up forming opinions about climate/weather during a long time ago. ………they can remember the global cooling scare in the 1970’s for instance.
However, as a 60 year old meteorologist that was not born yet in 1954, let alone the 1930’s but can tell you every detail about all the weather in all those years………………because I have weather records at my fingertip, I can appreciate the perspective of our oldest generation that was there or can remember the weather over the past 80 years.
Fact is, the past 3 decades have featured the best weather and climate on this planet in almost 1,000 years, since the Medieval Warm Period. I you were born in the past 30 years, your memory only knows what it’s been like during that period. The oldest people on this planet remember when it was worse because they were there, just like I have something even better than being there…………accurate data and records that prove it was worse. Those that state otherwise, much of the time, are not correct but are having the greatest influence on the opinions of our young people.
Did they subcontract their polling to Michael LaCour of UCLA?
Given the sketchy nature of the data, ambivalence is the correct position. All this study proves is that skeptics are more thoughtful, and likely more intelligent than non-skeptics.
So the people of Norway are ambivalent about climate change?
Would they be ambivalent about “Global Warming?” — Bring it on!
“can you do anything about our long winter nights, too?”
And as John W. Garrett above pointed out, Norway as a country and culture has done pretty well by its fossil fuel resources. I doubt Sea Level rise worries them much, either.
One of the tricks of sophists is to intermingle multiple issues. The multiple issues being intermingled in all climate change surveys are —
1) Catastrophic Man Made Climate Change
2) Man Made Climate Change
3) Natural Climate Change
The survey will begin by giving a clear definition of each of the above explaining their differences.
the body of the survey will be divided into three sections asking questions about topics 1, 2 and 3 separately. Each section will begin with the same header clearly defining all three — and then stating which of the issues will be inquired about in that section’s questions.
The point is to make it absolutely clear to the people taking the survey what it is each question is referring to — either Catastrophic Man Made Climate Change or Man Made Climate Change or Natural Climate Change.
The first question under topic ! would be — Do you believe in Catastrophic Man Made Climate Change? The first question under topic 2 would be — Do you believe in Man Made Climate Change? The first question under topic 3 would be — Do you believe in Natural Climate Change?
Note: Provision should be made so that those taking the survey can go back and change their answers because the dividing up of the topics will force them to reconsider some “knee jerk” answers.
(As an aside a new term needs to come into our vocabulary — Sophist Surveyors — meaning those who confuse multiple topics to arrive at answers they want — or perform other sophist tricks with their questions.)
Now most surveyors are not evil — just ignorant. Surveyors need to take courses in logic — so they came come to appreciate how illogical and sophistic their surveys are.
Surveys should be a precise form of communication between the surveyor and those being surveyed — but most often because of poor questioning there is no communication at all.
Eugene WR Gallun