Comments on: Polls Apart

By: Pages tagged "unthinking"

Pages tagged "unthinking" — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 11:35:24 +0000

[...] bookmarks tagged unthinking Polls Apart saved by 20 others jbuffy bookmarked on 07/20/08 | [...]

By: Daryl

Daryl — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 22:21:40 +0000

Love the new look of the website!

Keep the great blogs coming!

Cheers.

By: littleblackduck

littleblackduck — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 15:32:00 +0000

Most of the people I know actually do buy into the AGW dogma to a degree, with comments about how ‘we’ are messing things up, or attributing an unusually rainy June to what ‘we’ must be doing… Thankfully though, most are not inclined to take much action and unlike some activists have enough other, more important priorities.
For me, what turned me into a ‘denier’ (since I’m generally skeptical by nature) is that I did just look at the facts.
I found sites like Realclimate more intent on being attack dogs against anyone who criticized their models and found a lot of the arguments quite weak. It was their shear arrogance that made me start to seriously doubt them. To be honest, I didn’t at first want to believe that global warming wasn’t true. I’m not ideologically conservative (nor socialist!), but the more closely I searched for ‘consensus’ the more smoke and mirrors I found.
What really did it for me, if someone from IPSOS is reading this, is Oreskes’ shoddy study published in Science, and the subsequent reaction by the Science magazine editor to a critique of that study. The editor rejected it, claiming such information was widely available on the Internet, knowing full well the emphasis that AGW proponents put on ‘peer-review’ publications. It seems ‘peer’ has less to do with scholarly peers and is more similar to grade-school cliques. Such intellectual dishonesty – which is what it is – is so prevalent on the global warming ’side’ that to me, they supplied the rope to hang themselves.

By: Dave Gardner

Dave Gardner — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 13:03:00 +0000

Guardian/ICM polls on the environment are notorious for producing suspicious looking results. The polling method supposedly abides by rules on taking random weghted samples and so forth, but they have a habit of producing results that look like some of the worst “8 out of 10 cats” type polls.

Here’s one from February 2006:

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/polls/story/0,,1717302,00.html

“The poll also suggests that the message that small changes in people’s domestic lives can make a difference appears to be hitting home: 83% said they or their family had turned the television off instead of leaving it on standby to protect the environment. Some 82% of households said they had turned the central heating down, 75% had installed low energy lightbulbs, 25% had cycled at least one journey instead of using the car and 24% said they had decided against a holiday that involved flying.

Ninety-two per cent said they recycled as much rubbish as possible, while 38% said they were likely to install solar panels, and 28% a wind turbine. Almost three-quarters (73%) said they would upgrade their home insulation.”

The above sounds like some strange parallel universe Britain rather the one I live in.

Here’s one from June 2005 in an attempt by the Guardian to influence the up and coming G8 summit at Gleneagles in 2005:

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/polls/story/0,11030,1511097,00.html

“An overwhelming 83% of voters want the prime minister to challenge the US president on the issue amid record public acceptance that climate change is a reality.”

If that 83% is correct, you would have expected the British public to have descended on the American embassy carrying burning torches.

By: Alex Cull

Alex Cull — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 12:39:00 +0000

Asking my (generally middling-to-low-income) colleagues and neighbours what their some of their main concerns are, the answers seem clear: food prices, petrol prices and house prices, in roughly that order. No-one’s talking about carbon footprints. On surveys, with questions like “Do you think the Government should do more about the environment?” I think people are likely to answer yes, a) because they equate the environment with fresh air, sanitation, parks and clean rivers, which are good things, and b) because no Government ever does enough about anything. Also, it’s easy enough for the public to generally go along with green measures if they are painless, or relatively so, like putting our paper in recycle bins. It’s when these green measures are not quite so painless and are in direct competition with the family’s food bill, that our true priorities become clear. At least that’s my opinion; someone living in an alternative looking-glass dimension like LynasWorld (TM) might think differently.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 09:10:00 +0000

I just want to say that you consistently hit the nail on the head with your commentaries. Keep the good work up and please please keep the resistance going.
I am skeptical to climate orthodoxy and I live in a constant state of frustration with the political world, the media, the so called eco activists and the drivel that they all espouse to the public.
In twenties years time people are going to look back at this period with astonishment. They are going to wonder ‘how on earth did we fall for this rubbish?’.
I recently wrote to my MP (Anne Milton) to discuss that as a climate skeptic I have no-one to vote for because there is no-one who won’t waste money on this rubbish. I got the expected response that ‘climate change is the greatest challenge facing us today’. I know my letter has little affect but I want to remind ‘them’ from time to time that there is a large silent majority who are either apathetic or strongly against climate orthodoxy and hope that one day they open their ears and eyes to reality.
All the best
Ben