It depends on how you ask: Three wording decisions can significantly alter estimates
Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania
![Question wording & response option effects across experimental conditions. Hollow circles correspond to mean levels of agreement with anthropogenic climate change, observed across experimental conditions. 95% confidence intervals extend out from each one. These analyses use weighted survey data and do not include Independents who 'lean' toward one party over the other. See the study and Supplementary Materials for additional information. Conditions: (1) Discrete, Hard DK [Don't Know], No Explainer; (2) Discrete, Soft DK, No Explainer; (3) Discrete, Hard DK, Explainer; (4) Discrete, Soft DK, Explainer; (5) Likert, Hard DK, No Explainer; (6) Likert, Soft DK, No Explainer; (7) Likert, Hard DK, Explainer; (8) Likert, Soft DK, Explainer Credit Motta et al. as published in Climatic Change.](https://i0.wp.com/wattsupwiththat.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/200575_web.jpg?resize=543%2C349&ssl=1 "200575_web")
What percentage of Americans believe in human-caused climate change?
The answer depends on what is asked – and how. In a new study, researchers at the Annenberg Public Policy Center (APPC) of the University of Pennsylvania found that “seemingly trivial decisions made when constructing questions can, in some cases, significantly alter the proportion of the American public who appear to believe in human-caused climate change.”
Surveying more than 7,000 people, the researchers found that the proportion of Americans who believe that climate change is human-caused ranged from 50 percent to 71 percent, depending on the question format. And the number of self-identified Republicans who say they accept climate change as human-caused varied even more dramatically, from 29 percent to 61 percent.
“People’s beliefs about climate change play an important role in how they think about solutions to it,” said the lead author, Matthew Motta, one of four APPC postdoctoral fellows who conducted the study. “If we can’t accurately measure those beliefs, we may be under- or overestimating their support for different solutions. If we want to understand why the public supports or opposes different policy solutions to climate change, we need to understand what their views are on the science.”
The study, published in Climatic Change, is based on an online survey of 7,019 U.S. adults conducted from September 11-18, 2018, who were presented with questions in one of eight formats.
Three ways of asking
The study tested three variations in question format in different combinations, in which respondents were:
- Given the option to respond with a choice of “don’t know” or allowed to just skip the question (a “hard” don’t know vs. a “soft” don’t know);
- Provided with explanatory text saying that climate change is caused by greenhouse gas emissions, or given no additional text apart from the question;
- Presented with discrete, multiple-choice responses and asked to pick the one that comes closest to their views – or shown a statement and asked how strongly they agreed or disagreed with it, using a seven-point agree-disagree scale.
The two extremes
Two formats produced the most extreme results:
- The “Pew Style” approach, which uses a clear “don’t know” option, no explanatory text, and a discrete choice among statements as to which best represents your views, produced the lowest acceptance of human-caused climate change: 50 percent of U.S. adults and just 29 percent of Republicans.
- The van Boven et al. approach cited by Leaf van Boven and David Sherman in a 2018 New York Times op-ed, “Actually, Republicans Do Believe in Climate Change.” This approach uses an agree-disagree scale and explanatory text and does not offer a “don’t know” option. In the present study, this format combination found that 71 percent of U.S. adults believe in human-caused climate change and 61 percent of Republicans – the highest level of acceptance among the eight question formats studied.
The researchers said that the differences show how question construction can produce widely varying reports about what the public purportedly thinks. But they cautioned that because the respondents in this study were not a representative sample of the U.S. adult population, the raw estimates can’t be read as definitively reflecting the acceptance of anthropogenic climate change (ACC).
How format choices matter
While other differences in wording and question structure have been studied, the researchers said these three choices in format have not been examined closely. Questions that lack a hard “don’t know” response may nudge participants to pick a response that doesn’t reflect their lack of an opinion – and thereby inflate acceptance of human-caused climate change. Likewise, they said questions that use explanatory text may push respondents toward a greater acceptance.
However, they found that the most substantively and statistically significant increases in belief in climate change came from the use of an agree-disagree scale (so-called Likert-style response options) instead of distinct choices in response. In other fields, the researchers wrote, the agree-disagree format has been shown to introduce acquiescence bias, which occurs when respondents “agree” with a statement in order to “avoid thinking deeply about the matter at hand” or “avoid appearing disagreeable to the interviewer…”
“We find evidence that questions featuring Likert-style response options tend to produce higher levels of belief in ACC than those offering discrete choices,” the researchers said. In the case of self-identified Republicans, the researchers suggested that the agree-disagree scale and absence of an alternate series of positions to choose from may have presented them with “more difficulty identifying and selecting the party’s stance on the issue.”
The researchers said that they found no differences in the way that these question format changes affected Republicans and Democrats. “We hope that our research can help to broadly raise awareness of measurement issues in the study of climate change opinion and alert scholars to which specific design elements are most likely to impact opinion estimates,” the researchers said.
They added that additional research is needed to understand the psychological mechanisms underlying the effects seen here.
In addition to Motta, the study was written by Annenberg Public Policy Center postdoctoral fellows Daniel Chapman, Dominik Stecula, and Kathryn Haglin. “An experimental examination of measurement disparities in public climate change beliefs” is published in Climatic Change.
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The Annenberg Public Policy Center was established in 1993 to educate the public and policy makers about the media’s role in advancing public understanding of political, health, and science issues at the local, state and federal levels. Follow APPC on Twitter and Facebook.
More “no schist Sherlock” studies. It has been known since opinion polling was invented that you could get the result you wanted based on how you worded and presented the questions. There is a whole industry of political polling based on doing just this.
Usually the aim is not really find out what anyone thinks but present a poll result as bias confirmation or to show “your side” is winning whatever argument/campaign.
CNN just published a poll showing that climate “action” was the no. 1 issue for Dems.
Dems can’t think for themselves. They think as a collective. What the Borg queen wants, the Borg queen gets.
Makes perfect sense given that the Democrat political party, over the last several decades at least, has increasingly derogated the value that individualism provides to our country in favor of a perceived benefit to society or to politically-favored demographic groups. Anyone whose oxymoronic mantra is “social justice” is the kind of person who is predisposed to let someone else do their thinking for them.
I agree that a loss of respect for individual autonomy on a series of issues results in “herd like” behavior. I wonder what the results would be if the survey questionnaire included queries that allowed the respondent to reveal his/her knowledge with the subject of ACC to some extent, such as a question asking the approximate atmospheric CO2 ppm levels, or asking questions about the sun, variance in solar irradiance, solar cycles, cosmic rays and cloud formation, the cause of plaice Ages and Interglacial, base rates of sea level rise, etc in the same format as those about CO2 and ACC. Just simply asking about these factors might reveal hidden biases or the lack of differences in belief in the warming effect of one variable versus another. The survey also needs to vary the order of the questions in the questionnaire to see if it plays a role.
Right on, Greg. At least the majority of polling is a commercial enterprise, and patrons are free to select the service that is most likely to provide the weighting they want. My twin brother was interviewed as a Gallup Poll Responder, and actually responded to several questionnaires, then for the last year nothing. I remarked to him that they just figured out he didn’t know the right answers. Same for the report on polling above, with the key quote “alert scholars to which specific design elements are most likely to impact opinion elements.” In other words, what wording of questions obtains your intended result best.
Anyone with enough intelligence can see right through most survey questions. When younger we used to regularly confound the local Scientology street pollsters. For a free ‘whatever-they-were-offering’ we’d take about 30 minutes to take their “auditing survey”. Quickly you could surmise similar questions worded differently. We’d answer diametrically opposed answers to each. The ‘scorers’ would often become aghast that we walking psychopaths in need of counseling. Perhaps in those instances they were correct as we derived pleasure from toying idiots, but we rationalized our actions by assuming whatever time they wasted on use could not be spent doing real harm to the public.
As part of security clearances, I have had to take the MMPI (Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory) a number of times. After a few times, I was able to discern what the “right” answers were and see what they were looking for. It’s hard to believe that test has been used for decades for such an important purpose.
There are also pollsters that know how to word their question to receive a good estimate so as to advise candidates. We seldom get to see such polls. However the problem even those pollsters are having caused them substantial consternation in 2016.
Of course there is a fundamental problem when the question is whether one believes in climate change versus anthropogenic climate change. Show me a poll that then describes some of the supposed solutions for AGW, the estimate cost and then asks whether they support it or not.
The final problem is the supposed substantial difference between Republicans and Democrats. The pollsters’ explanation almost always infers that Democrat “believe in science” and Republicans don’t. When I have found just the opposite to be true. What it appeared to me if I said something was based on science Democrats accepted without question. They never questioned nor so a need to question the science.
Take a look at Biden’s pick for climate change advisers:
https://truepundit.com/middle-ground-conservatives-wary-of-bidens-hiring-of-former-obama-climate-change-advisers/
Is this true?
Well, yes, it’s always been intuitively known that you could skew the results by how you word the questions but this is interesting and, to my knowledge, new information about exactly how that skewing happens, which question formats are most likely to be unreliable and even some hints at quantification of the degree of bias that a particular question format will introduce.
For the subset of pollsters who are interested in getting accurate data, this is a useful study.
There is nothing new here. The various polling companies have these kinds of problems well in hand. The can tell a customer exactly how to word the question to get a particular result, and how to get negative results. They also know the best way to word questions to get useful, as in actually answering the question results that can be used.
Companies have used these question techniques since the 1950’s if not earlier to test new products, test advertising campaigns, explore how to get a more positive company image, etc.
And Hillary, according to pre 2016 election polls, would win in a landslide.
Because the study of “climate change opinion” is vitally important when most people remain unconvinced by your flawed “science”.
” In a warming world with extreme weather events happening more often, here and now, and with the world entering the 6th mass extinction event in the history of the planet, how important do you think climate action is?”
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 please choose.
“To what extent do you think the presentation of the last question may have influenced your response?”
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 please choose.
if 1 is none and 7 is extreme, that survey would get a 1 from me on the first question and a 7 for the second. If an interviewer/researcher asked why, my response would be that I never think taking action on science fiction is appropriate and for the second question my response would be that you posed a science fiction scenario so of course my answer was effected.
‘How often do you beat Your wife?’
A: Not often
B: Quite often
C: Every day
Result: 100% are wife beaters…….
No to mention that 100% of those surveyed have wives….
No problem. We’ll just use kriging to extrapolate the percentage to include those without wives. Then we’ll apply Lewandoski correlation: people who have wives generally don’t beat them, so we can assume that people who don’t have wives would beat them if they had them, and include those in the count of beaters, even though they don’t have wives to beat. Voilà!
Or, as it’s sometimes phrased:
“Have you stopped beating your wife?”
A:Yes
B:No
Same result.
A number of “studies” have been conducted to further the 97% consensus myth – via questionnaires that even a dyed in the wool skeptic such as myself would come out as part of the consensus.
Questions such as “Do you believe that CO2 is a greenhouse gas ?”, “Do you believe man’s CO2 emissions are contributing to global CO2 levels ?”, “Do you believe the climate is warming up ?” “Do you believe additional CO2 will cause warming ?” etc. etc. I would have to answer “yes” to – but that still does not make me part of the consensus. This is an example of a “scientific survey” being crafted to get the answer they were looking for in the first place.
In addition the bulk of persons responding are either unqualified to answer or have not researched the topic and are answering with their heart rather than their head.
These are invariably poorly constructed and conducted studies which violate all standard practice with respect to scientific conduct of such studies to eliminate bias in the process – just the opposite in fact the studies are contrived to “mine” that bias.
Try these questions :-
Do you believe man’s CO2 output will cause significant climate change ?
My Answer – No!
Do you believe man can significantly influence the climate by adjusting his CO2 output ?
My Answer – Absolutely not!
Do you believe the benefits of reducing CO2 output will outweigh the cost ?
My answer – I doubt that there will be any benefits from reducing CO2 and the cost will be so outrageously high it will impact on your health & wellbeing.
No schist Sherlock – of course the format of the question matters !
“This is an example of a “scientific survey” being crafted to get the answer they were looking for in the first place.”
Yes, this research is aimed at figuring out why the public is not more exercised about CAGW. The researchers know CAGW is a big problem, and they want to know why others can’t see what they can see.
They assume CAGW is real and they look at their research task from that angle. As with many things CAGW, people sometimes assume too much, and this leads them astray.
Let’s get this right: If you provide an explanatory lie that climate change is caused by carbon dioxide, lots of people will believe the lie. That’s it???
It is generally accepted that most people tend to give the answer the interviewer wants, so it helps those people to be given the ‘right’ answer beforehand. There is a strong minority (well-represented on this site) who prefer to give the answer the interviewer doesn’t want: this is most fun when in direct contact with the interviewer. Pointing out the defects in their questions also upsets them.
Lets ask them what % of the atmosphere is comprised of CO2 ???
They don’t know, for the most part…
I participate once a week on a quiz at a local pub, and the standards among the teams are usually quite high (including a lot of students from the local university/engineering school). As quizmaster I once asked them to name the three gases that constitutes most of the atmosphere, and (surprise-surprise) tragically few knew that Argon is almost twenty times more abundant than the scaring CO2…..
Argon, even at slightly less than 1% is almost 25 times more abundant in the atmosphere than Carbon Dioxide.
In Houston, it’s N2, O2, and H2O. Most of the time water vapor is at a higher concentration than argon (0.93 mol% – dry air).
“Lets ask them what % of the atmosphere is comprised of CO2 ???”
Or ask them if they know how much net heat current levels of CO2 add to the Earth’s atmosphere.
Not one person on this planet can give you that number.
Why should we spend Trillions of dollars fixing a non-existent CAGW problem when not one person on the planet can tell you how much CO2 is adding to the net heat of the Earth’s atmosphere?
We have to know that figure before we can start making credible predictions about the future, but not one person on this planet knows that figure. I think we are putting the cart before the horse.
I know, there’s a lot of money in putting the cart before the horse. That’s the problem. 🙂
Tom: I tried to get a feel for the amount of energy in the atmosphere by calculating the value of the specific heat of the atmosphere with various levels of CO2 concentration. I used CO2 in ppmv of 400, 800, and 4000. To four significant figures: No difference. Cp is the slope of the energy-temperature relationship for the mixture of gases that make up the atmosphere, so should show the effect of the concentration difference. Ain’t there; just not enough in there. Btw, I call BS that CO2 “magically” traps and holds energy absorbed in the 10 to 20 micron band. Any energy that runs up the vibrational or rotational energy states in CO2 is almost instantly transferred to N2. After all, the concentration of N2 is approximately 2000 times that of CO2 (never mind O2)…
Do you support the Republican plan to destroy the environment?
Do you support the Republican plan to defund Medicare and destroy Social Security?
…Ah, I see what you did there: assume a supposition or innuendo as a fact.
Question:
Being that no human in the history of mankind has ever demonstrated, by empirical means (in other words a guy standing in the middle of a field with measurement apparatus) that atmospheric CO2 causes the planet to warm, do you now believe that:
1. Atmospheric CO2 causes the planet to warm?
2. That man made CO2 at ~0.0012% of the atmosphere is causing the planet any distress whatsoever?
3. Innumerable scientists, governments, the MSM, and industry are lying to your face?
Please provide a YES or NO answer to each question.
Providing the wrong answer will render you liable to incarceration in the local mental health institute.
Indeed Scotty, but I would add…
“Being that no human in the history of mankind has ever demonstrated, by empirical means (in other words a guy standing in the middle of a field with measurement apparatus) that atmospheric CO2 causes the planet to warm, even though billions of dollars has been spent trying, and thousands of influential people would pay many more billions to do it… do you now believe that:”
These sorts of comments display the same ignorant crap that people who want to gaol deniers show.
Its never ever going to be solved with believe now type arguments. People have so much invested in believing what they do. Just because you tell them something different is not going to change anything in the short term.
Patient, open debate is the only way to get traction on this.
[ring, ring]
Me: “Hello”
Surveyor: ” Hello, I’d like to ask you some questions for a survey
Me: [click}
Surveyor: “on climate change… Hello?”
Ha! You’re too slow, icisil.
If the first words after “Hello” aren’t “My name is…” they get the click. Next hurdle is “from XYZ Corp.” And if they get past my question, “Why are you calling me? I’m on the Do Not Call list” what the hey, I hang up on them anyhow.
My wife is worse ;o) It’s a tough crowd in our house.
Does man affect the climate?
Near certainly.
Is man the dominant cause of climate change?
Near certainly not.
By only asking the first question they then assume they have answered the second.
From the article: “The researchers said that the differences show how question construction can produce widely varying reports about what the public purportedly thinks.”
This is not new knowledge. Perhaps it is new to the researchers.
They need to go study Propaganda 101. I think question construction is one of the first lessons.
From the article: “In the case of self-identified Republicans, the researchers suggested that the agree-disagree scale and absence of an alternate series of positions to choose from may have presented them with “more difficulty identifying and selecting the party’s stance on the issue.”
These researchers must think Skeptics look at things the way Democrats do. Democrats take their cues from the Democrat Party. They toe the Party Line. Democrats are conformists. Democrats are followers.
Do you think Skeptics are conformists? Skeptics don’t conform on CAGW and they apply that same thought process to politics: If the Republicans do something good, they are praised, and if they do something bad, they are criticized. Skeptics are not followers. They don’t look for the party line to figure out what to believe.
I don’t see how trying to determine the percentage of people who “believe in anthropogenic climate change” is going to reveal anything of value.
For those who believe that a small proportion of climate change is due to anthropogenic causes, how do they answer the question of “Do you believe in anthropogenic climate change?” Even if there is a question somewhere asking people what proportion of climate change is man responsible for, how would that be reflected on their simple chart?
The researchers are missing an important dimension. They’re trying to determine what proportion of people believe man is causing climate change, when they should be trying to determine what proportion of climate change people believe man is responsible for. Did they really spend all that time talking to 7,000 people and not even account for the mainstream skeptic position?
Garbage in, garbage out…
I’m more troubled that PhD’s/post docs were needed to do this simple study. Do people realize this era of average IQ PhDs (or even just being in University with low IQs) is the root cause of the dreadful state science is in with 90% unreplicable studies (and likely more than half the 10% that are, being trivial) swelling the literature into a worthless word porridge?
Climate ‘science’, because it has dispensed with the rigor of falsifiability and because it is dogmatic on an agreed upon theory, zealously guarded, attracts the mediocre. Hey, you don’t get a correlation with the dogma, put it through multiple statistical manipulations. There thats a little better Let’s see, if I throw this data or these proxies out and double weight these ones, Bob’s your uncle! Still wanting? Invent a novel statistical data grinder that converts red noise to a hockey stick! Do these guys and gals have research notebooks to show the path to the result? Not in your life!
I note there is a great deal of effort being put forward on how to make a poll that will convince politicians that speculative science fiction is real and thus get them to do what is not in their constituents’ best interests. What we have is a bunch of modern day propagandists trying to tweak their art.
Jon Krosnick, a professor of communication and of political science at Stanford, conducts polls on climate change and explains how survey results are influenced greatly by the design of the questioning process. Helpfully, the Stanford program provides this history of the questions put to participants over the years. Below are the result categories, some showing the evolving form of questioning, and others just the most recent form for brevity.
Details at https://rclutz.wordpress.com/2018/07/17/the-art-of-rigging-climate-polls/
A most revealing poll question would be:
How much should your taxes increase to fight climate change?
1.) None…leave me alone.
2.) Increase my taxes 10-30 %… I want to help
3.) Double my taxes…Climate Change is really important
4.) Take all my money since we will all die if you don’t.
#4 reminds me of the quote from Randy Marsh in a South Park episode: “With all due respect Mr. Cliched Dissenting Republican, the economy won’t matter, the day after tomorrow”…what a perfect episode.
5.) My taxes should be decreased for helping the planets plant life via the release of the life-sustaining plant food known as CO2 into the atmosphere.
Somehow that options never shows up on the polls.
I see this was an online survey. That makes it easier to get a lot of responses but also in and of itself creates a bias. It looks like they knew this and thus indicated these results were not truly representative.
First of all it reduces the number of older folks who have seen it all before and are more likely to be skeptical. It also makes it more open to a single person taking the survey multiple times.
“we need to understand what their views are on the science.”
I haven’t seen any “science”.. just a hypothesis, and a whole bunch of data that has been “adjusted”, or “corrected”, or “normalized” (??) in an attempt to prove the hypothesis. That aint “science”
Surveys can be rigged by the way a question is asked, time of day and location to get the desired result.
Gooday Sir/Madam I’m from the Gummint and I’m conducting a small survey.
Q: Do you believe in climate change?
A: Yes
Q: How much are you prepared to donate right now to the Stop Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming Fund?
A: Slam!
I strongly agree that climate change is caused by human activity. Humans have chosen to site monitors in terrible locations, or allow encroachment that makes good locations much worse, resulting in a significant urban heat island effect, caused by human activity, in the temperature record. Humans have chosen to switch the coating on the monitor housing in the middle of the relevant measuring period, resulting in another human-caused component in the temperature record that desperately need further investigation and quantification. Humans have deliberately parameterized their climate models for a noticable change in temperature in comparison with a modest 18 ppmv change in CO2 concentration during the first few decades of the 20th century, leading to an artificially high response in the models to CO2 increases. All of this is the result of human activity. None of this says anything about the underlying physical reality of the climate.
Bingo Kemaris.
Also humans have chosen to infer a signal from noise , as the so called warming ( in an entirely imaginary metric of Average Global Temperature) is less that the known error range in those human adjusted temperature readings.
If your signal does not rise above the error bands, it is noise NOT information.
Natural variation swamps completely any “signal” that may be present of Man’s ability to affect the weather or the climate.
This year: This week here in mid-May is only going to get UP to 76 F as the highest temperature, mostly lower than that.
Last year: The same week here it was a scorching 93 F as the high.
See? We’ve already solved the “problem” of warming caused by CO2!
Man’s effect on the weather (and thus climate which is just weather over time) is like opening wide the front door of your heated home in the winter, or your cooled home in the summer – no real effect whatsoever, except you get yelled at by your parents or spouse…
Obviously, the real question is ‘do most Americans believe human-caused climate change is destroying the planet’.
Whatever that number is, the reason is because they’ve been lied to.
Polling is another “soft science”, about as useful as that old joke about the three accountants.
The true measurement of the public concern for an issue is how much of their own money they will put toward it.
Maybe the Pollies should try crowd sourcing their stupid ideas before committing political suicide.
Not half as entertaining for the political junkies, but far less damaging to the national economy.
Canada is running the experiment right now.
Forced contribution to a “Cost of pollution”.
A carbon tax, but not a carbon tax when it comes to court?
Deceit being the bureaucratic way.
Now our falsely accused Vice Admiral crowdsources $400 000 dollars for his legal defence and will raise more.
Compare these two.
One “issue” the government has to extort the taxpayer with a new sliding fee(A tax) and a whole bunch of innumeric lies.
on the other issue,people gave of their own free will,to fight an criminal injustice.
So which one is the more accurate poll?
I wonder what the response if the question was asked in the form “Given the near zero accuracy of climate science beaten significantly by astrologer’s predictions do you believe their theory that climate change is man made is beyond question.
You guys do realize you are going to the FEMA camps first, right?
I have never in any scientific class or endeavor considered what I “believed” to matter. It was always what I could prove or disprove, or what my results were and how accurate they were. Not only are the current models not accurate, they don’t know the sensitivity of the climate to various factors. In other words, not only is the science not settled, it’s not even close to being fully developed.
And, IMO, any claims of belief at this point are more akin to theology than science.
Many years ago there was a brilliant BBC TV show, “Yes Prime Minister.
Bernard was bailed up by a bunch of reporters and blutted out a answer
which the reporters liked.
Later Sur Humphrey was explaining to Bernard about how to answered
difficult questions.
He quoted a typical question at that time. “Do you believe in conscription
of youths into the armed forces ?
He then said that there were two answers.
Good answer, make them better citizens by a bit of discipline,
Bad answer “Create a well trained bunch of thugs, which could cause
massive civil disruption.
I am not saying that all polls are rigged, the political pollsters if they want
to be asked again and again to conduct them, have to be as accurate as
possible, but if say a Green group wants to make politicians scared, easily
done, then they want a result which favours their point of view.
MJE VK5ELL
Mixing of statements: “human-caused climate change”
What to answer if you accept that climate change happens but not that it is caused by humans?
And climate change in itself is not defined at all. Some concider it to be weather and some think it is global warming and anything in between.
“Look out your window and you can see climate change”.
The polls used to be about AGW, but now I see that the polls are about ‘climate change’. At least we understood what the metric was for global warming. What is the metric for climate change? Is it rate of change of the climate? I’ve never seen a chart with ‘rate of climate change’. What exactly is the unit of measure? If anyone thinks they know what is meant by climate change, I don’t have much confidence that they’ve thought it through. Can we please go back to debating and polling global warming?
Three ways of asking:
They forgot to include:
1. (Money Where Mouth is): Despite colder winters featuring superabundant snowfalls which have left reservoirs brimming across the West, the (…cough) “threat” posed by global warming is certainly growing and I would personally like to pay utility companies more money to help fix it to the tune of … a) $500 b) $5,000 c) $50,000 d) $500,000 e) all the above
2. (Energy): To help fight the war against the EVIL, DIRTY UTILITY companies my family would agree to suffer periodic mid-summer and mid-winter brown and black outs for periods of up to: a) two hours b) two days c) two weeks d) indefinitely e) just until we have saved the planet
3. (Transportation): I have already a) garaged my car and started taking the bus b) sold my car and begun legging it c) publicly demolished my car with a sledge hammer to demonstrate my “green elan” d) willed my car to the homeless and quit my job to teach the Man that I won’t be made a pawn of
4. (Science): One of the following is NOT A CAUSE OF global warming. Which one? a) drought b) floods c) toenail discoloration d) polar vortex e) None – they ALL cause global warming
5. The Annenberg Public Policy Foundation can be trusted to a) not run with sharp scissors b) present tendentious public policy surveys on global warming with a deliberate bias c) not touch your retirement 401 Ks and Roth Account numbers even if you told them, “Take it, damn it! It’s yours!” d) send your mother flowers today for Mother’s Day