After the hottest ever El Nino year with relentless propaganda on Australian media, even a loaded survey finds that only 39% of Australians agree that humans are the major drivers of the climate. The survey is being painted as a success by obedient “journalists”. But this is not skyrocketing support, it’s more likely last gasp noise. The results will be down again next year (with the weather).
It is yet another meaningless motherhood survey that avoids asking real questions, offers unbalanced answers, and uses the same ambiguous language as most of these pointless surveys do. Would you like apple-pie?
Who doesn’t want nicer weather — and for free?
The questions climate fans are too scared to ask
Obviously The Climate Institute don’t want real answers, which they must know would be devastating. They won’t ask how much people want to pay out their own pocket to fix the climate. They won’t ask people to rank “climate change” against all the other issues they care about. They won’t ask people if Climate Change is a scam, a con, or a scheme to make the green industry rich (a year ago a US poll showed 31% were happy to call climate change a “total hoax“). Things don’t get more skeptical than that, but if surveyors don’t ask, they’ll never know.
These surveys never ask if the public thinks windmills will slow storms or make floods less likely. There is a good reason for that…
The ugly truth — for the public it’s not important, and they don’t want to pay
Real surveys show that only 3% of US people think climate is most important issue. When it comes to funding, almost half, 42%, of US adults don’t even want to pay a paltry, pathetic, $12 a year to stop climate change. Likewise 80% of Australians don’t donate to environmental causes or vote for it, only12% of Australians want to pay two dollars to offset their Jetstar flight (and it’s less for Qantas). The truth is the public can recite the permitted lines, but any survey that digs below the superficial “bumper sticker” level finds the public are jaded, don’t want to cough up anything themselves and rank everything else as more important.
The results are the same all over the western world. Even after a heavy loaded survey lists climate disasters, half of Brits don’t want to pay a cent. When asked almost the same question, (is it mostly human driven?) 56% of Canadians are skeptics. When the Swiss were asked if they should change their VAT to a carbon tax 92% of the Swiss said “No Thanks“. It was sold to them as “paying less tax” overall and saving the world, but almost everyone in Switzerland thought it was a dumb idea. That wasn’t a poll, it was a referendum.
Gullible journalists and poorly trained science communicators
The unequivocal acceptance of loaded weak surveys says a lot about journalistic and academic standards. The Climate Institute is a group whose whole existence depends convincing people that we should be alarmed about the climate. Poor Fergus Hunter of the SMH is supposedly “a breaking news reporter for Fairfax Media in the federal press gallery at Parliament House”. But he swallows the press release entirely, asking no hard questions and doing no research. Likewise The Conversation runs with the agitprop — James Whitmore, Editor at The Conversation does no analysis and provides no balance. Pravda would be proud. In an academic wasteland, Will Grant is paid at the ANU to lecture in the public awareness of science but apparently hasn’t done so much as a 2 second google search on climate surveys, nor has he been taught how to write surveys. Shame, but that’s what government funding gets you. Parrots.
Climate change is a dead issue for voters
Both sides of politics know that climate change is a dead dog electorally. Tom Steyer threw $74 million into a campaign to convince voters to be very afraid in the 2014 midterm elections. Nearly all of Steyers favourite climate candidates failed. Hillary Clinton only talks climate when she wants to appeal to the Bernie Sanders set. With Trumps outrageous “climate denial”, she has the perfect opportunity to appeal to the supposed skyrocking masses of “concerned voters” but she couldn’t even be bothered trying it on with the Millennial voters.
For the mainstream voters, climate issues get hidden so the electorate won’t cane them. The only passion in the electorate is for blood oaths to get rid of carbon taxes.
How loaded are these questions?
“I think that climate change is occurring” — even skeptics like me would say “yes” to this – yet 23% of Australians didn’t agree.
In a landscape of trite questions, 75% of Australians might think that governments in Australia “need to implement a plan to ensure the orderly closure of old coal plants and replace them with clean energy.” But what’s the alternative, that governments shouldn’t plan? Making plans with someone else’s money is a tooth fairy kind of commitment. It’s amazing that a quarter of Australians don’t even think the Government should implement a plan.
And glory be, only 3% of people say “coal is their preferred energy source” but for virtually every Australian 73% of their electricity is created with coal. They are all free to go off-grid and be totally renewable. Almost no one does it. Why not ask Australian’s if they’d like to pay 10c a KWhr for electricity from coal (which wholesales at 3 or 4 c).
God forbid, 90% would suddenly have a different preference.
The Report “Climate of the Nation 2016”.
h/t David B.