54% of Australians skeptics of man-made global warming, 80% don’t donate to environment or vote for it

The devastating result of the latest CSIRO survey: 54% of Australians don’t believe the experts at the IPCC, and are not convinced that humans are the dominant cause of climate change. Starkly, only 28% of Liberal voters agree with Malcolm Turnbull. Amazingly 40% of Labor voters and even a quarter of green voters don’t accept the IPCC litany. Presumably they think humans have some effect but are not the major cause.

More importantly, even most of those who believe are not motivated. When it comes to spending money on the environment, 80% of Australians don’t voluntarily do it and 80% don’t care enough to change their vote because of this issue. Despite all the relentless propaganda, despite all the government funded groups being in lock-step, the trends are slowly falling for believers (from 2010-2014), though not “statistically significantly”. (Though longer term studies from 1990 to now show that falling trend).

The survey: CSIRO — Australian attitudes to Climate Change, 2015 PDF

Don’t miss below how a climate science professor reveals that most of the people he knows just follow their political team’s fashions. How telling? Also below, see how the ABC spins this to meaninglessness to support the religion. It’s all so predictable.

Most Australians disagree with IPCC experts

Left leaning voters are less skeptical, and more gullible

This graph of political views could be re-titled “the gullibility index”. Three quarters of Green voters believe mankind controls the weather. But three quarters of coalition voters aren’t fooled. Those who are more likely to take entrepreneurial risks, who face real competition, and believe in true free markets have a better grounding in reality. What a surprise.

Most Australians won’t voluntarily pay money to environmental causes, nor will they change their vote

This survey is loaded, and still uses the ambiguous term “climate change” as if it means something. That said, it’s bigger and better than most others of its kind. But sadly it was still written as though man-made global warming is powerful, threatening, and worth doing something about. Usually, they even surveyed the same individuals over the years, and as many as half of them changed their opinion on climate change at least once. In other words, half the population is neither here nor there, and their views may shift depending on the weather, or what they heard on the radio the day before. As I’ve said all along, we are only one good prime time documentary away from ending the meme. No wonder the believers are panicky about counter opinions. More of the same propaganda is not going to increase the number of believers, but if the skeptic talking points get a public airing it’s all over.

University, media and public servants just follow their political team … as revealed by Prof Pitman

Peter Hannam of the Sydney Morning Herald headlines it CSIRO survey: Most Coalition voters reject humans to blame for climate change

Professor Andy Pitman reveals that most people around him just follow their masters, and don’t think for themselves. He projects this passive gullibility onto enrepeneurs, risk takers, self employed people and small business owners who are more likely to vote “right”, predicting they will be as passive as the public servants and media that he knows:

Andy Pitman, Director of ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science at the University of NSW, predicted that many Coalition voters will take their cue from the new PM and shift their views. “To a substantial degree, when asked, a significant fraction of the public say what they think their preferred party says” on issues such as climate change, Professor Pitman said. “My experience of the public service and right the way through to some media outlets, they absolutely listen to the vibe from the top and respond to it,” he said.

The university and media elite believe they think for themselves, but narcissistically and arrogantly assume that most Australians don’t. The reality of course is that it’s the university “thinkers” who follow the fashions in thinking more slavishly than anyone else.

The ABC spin doesn’t represent 54% of Australians

The ABC predictably cherry picks the last meaningless statistic that still “looks good” for believers and turns that into a headline (if only ABC journalists were trained to understand surveys?). If you don’t define a basic English phrase like “climate change” as scientific, literal, or a political slogan, and then ask an ambiguous question in a loaded survey, you can still get a response that can be spun to look as though people believe in a political meme, when a lot of them are actually just admitting they believe in ice ages.

The ABC segment where Brissenden and Keany fail to discuss the most politically point (that most Australians are skeptical of the IPCC and 80% don’t care enough to vote on environmental issues) is called “The Full Story” — Orwell, Orwell, Orwell.

A testament to propaganda

The most gullible Australians have soaked up some uber alarming scenarios which are wildly high even compared to the IPCC projections. Nearly 10% of people somehow believe that in only 20 years time we might be 3 whole degrees hotter.

Let me know when Professor Andy Pitman or any author on the IPCC tries to correct this false belief.

On the other hand, despite the propaganda, on rainfall, Australians are pretty evenly split. After the endless drought ended, there have been too many floods and mothballed desalination plants in Australia for the public to believe the Tim Flannery prophesies that the dams will never fill.

Those loaded questions:

It’s obvious from the phrasing that the survey writers can’t conceive of a reality where the Sun controls the climate, and warming and CO2 are beneficial.

“How much do you think each of the following groups is responsible for climate change?”

“Expected future increases in intensity of events in respondents’ region…”

”How much do you think climate change will harm…”

From the ABC interview: the CSIRO researcher herself says that believing this is driven by political leanings is an oversimplification. Despite that, I predict the ABC and the Fairfax press will continue to spread the message that almost all skeptics are ideologically motivated.

FRANCIS KEANY: “What about people’s political leanings?”

ZOE LEVISTON: “Again, if you look at it in isolation, you can see that there are patterns between people’s political orientation – even patterns in who people vote for and how they respond to climate change.

But if you look at things like deep seated world views, again, that human-nature interaction, that accounts for that variability we see in those more surface order things like political orientation.

So again, those connections or those relationships we see are explained by quite deep, fundamental orientations towards the environment and humans in general.

You know, I think it’s an oversimplification to say it’s driven by political leanings.”

Some questions are loaded to groom,

The unwary surveyed to assume,

Global warming is fact,

And that mankind must act,

To avert future climate-change doom.

–Ruairi

So many contradictions in the one survey

This survey resurveyed the same people and found a lot of individuals are flip flopping on views from one year to the next. The same people hold contradictory views. The answer probably is that the survey questions are biased, and as people get further into the loaded questions they respond more as believers which contradicts their earlier position on more neutral questions. 5,000 people did two or more surveys, but only 269 people did all five.

The researchers say they should be cautious in interpreting results. I say they should design better and more neutral surveys:

There are several reasons to be cautious in interpreting basic opinions on the causes of climate change as a

definitive ‘belief’. First, those who endorse the statement indicating climate change is just a natural

fluctuation in Earth’s temperatures, also later estimated that nearly half (46.7%) of all climate change could

be attributed to human activity. Second, this group also gave moderate to high ratings of responsibility to

entities such as big-polluting countries and multinational corporations for both causing and responding to

climate change. Third, those who endorsed the opinion statement that climate change was not happening

at all later estimated around a third (34.6%) of all climate change could be attributed to human activity.

This group also gave responses about perceived impacts of climate change not consistent with their

position: for instance, on average they thought different groups of people would experience at least some

harm from the effects of climate change. The case remains however that one’s basic opinion was clearly

related to behavioural engagement and support for adaptation initiatives. Taken together, this suggests

that people’s basic opinions do not represent a static belief, but rather might best be viewed as a

‘positioning statement’ that gives a broad indication of the perceived threat posed by climate change, and

the urgency and magnitude with which a person feels it should be addressed.

Basic opinions and attitudes toward climate change were relatively stable at an aggregate level, but this

masks considerable volatility within individuals over time. For instance, nearly half of the repeat

respondents changed their opinion at least once during the five surveys. Even between 2013 and 2014,

over a quarter of respondents (29%) changed their opinion. There are competing explanations for this

volatility: it may reflect limitations in the reliability of the measure, it may reflect uncertainty in the minds

of the respondents or changes in their own life circumstances, or it may reflect the influence of societal level

fluctuations such as recent weather events, political events, and scientific findings. It is probably a

combination of all of these.

BACKGROUND

This report presents the findings of a longitudinal survey of Australians from 2010 to 2014. Conducted annually in July and August of each year, we surveyed a total of 17,493 Australians; 4,999 of whom completed two or more surveys, and 269 of whom completed all five. The surveys formed part of a research program investigating the ways in which Australians think about climate change, and the activities they are undertaking to mitigate or adapt to its impacts.

REFERENCE

Leviston, Z., Greenhill,M., & Walker, I. (2015) Australians attitudes to climate change and adaptation: 2010-2014. CSIRO, Australia.

h/t Pat, David B, Andrew McRae, bemused.

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