Despite all the spin, the non-stop propaganda, a dreadful drought and the two “record” hot years, most Australians still don’t agree with the IPCC. This is exactly the same as it was in 2015 when the CSIRO last did a serious climate poll.
The IPSOS Climate Change Report
So we sit, a nation of majority skeptics, with no major party to vote for and hardly any TV media, academics or politicians making the case that the IPCC might be wrong and the Paris agreement might be a waste of time. No one is allowed to discuss it and national leaders stay cowed in silence for fear of being called petty names.
There is little to crystallize or focus this sentiment that doubts the experts, yet it exists, even in surveys designed by a team who appear to be doing their best to find and amplify the “believer” vote.
The IPSOS survey suffers from the the usual flaws: loaded questions, ambiguous terms and one sided analysis. Respondents are asked magical pie questions about solving problems as if they only need to wave a fairy wand and it shall be solved. They’re not asked how many dollars they personally want to spend solving it. It’s as if life is not about the costs and benefits or trade-offs. It’s as deep as saying if you could save the world for free, would you?
54% of Australian don’t believe man-made climate change is the dominant driver. | Ipsos, 2019.
What really matters is what would you give up in order to change this?
This new IPSOS climate change poll of 1000 people was conducted in December and finally published, coincidentally, on Sunday before the Labor Party launched its climate policy. IPSOS are telling Australians on the verge of an election that this is some kind of new record momentum. Matt Wade, at The Sydney Morning Herald repeats the IPSOS press release, “this was a record share of Australians that say humans cause climate change”. It’s the usual half-truth — the whole truth is that the CSIRO did multiple surveys involving 17,000 people from 2010 – 2014 and nothing has changed. Isn’t that the kind of research that both IPSOS and investigative reporters might want to mention?
Here are the CSIRO results from 2015. Spot the difference?
The gap between what the experts say and the public believes exists all around the world. In the US the AAAS found that while 87% of experts say climate change mostly “man-made” only 50% of Americans thought the experts were right. (And that was before Trump arrived — it’d be bound to be less now.)
Only 86% of Australians “believe” man-kind has any effect at all
To get a high number IPSOS and the parrot-media bundle together all the people who believe man-made climate change has any possible effect at all. They report that “86% of Australians believe humans contribute to climate change in some way”. That’s a category that would include most die-hard skeptics (like me) — so it’s about as meaningless a statement as anyone can make. The only thing it tells us is that the IPSOS investigators badly want to spin this.
If one third of Australians think the situation is part man – part nature, that’s a lot of people who already think the news is hyped and who won’t want to spend a lot of money.
Where do Australians rank climate change — last
When voters can rank climate change it’s the last thing they care about. Year after year, “the environment” is dead last on pretty much every survey, everywhere.
How many times do people need to tell politicians that being a skeptic isn’t the vote killer that some commentators would like you to believe? Even people who believe in man-made global warming just aren’t as concerned about the environment as they are about jobs, corruption, and the economy.
What’s the biggest issue at the moment: Cost of Living.
Note that this graph was done in colors that were so indecipherably similar it was almost like IPSOS didn’t want us to see the data (see that original). So I changed the colors.
IPSOS report page 4.
IPSOS’s headline about that bottom green line is “Environment returns as an important issue”. Well, No. It doesn’t.
I’ll have more to say about this survey…
h/t Dave B.
REFERENCES
The IPSOS Climate Change Report
CSIRO — Australian attitudes to Climate Change, 2015 PDF