Forty years of trust in science drops after pandemic

By Jo Nova

The brand-name of science is being trashed

Trust in science continues to fall. The disillusionment with the Covid response has spread to science in general. Anthony Fauci said “trust the science” then showed us how untrustworthy science was. SARS-2 definitely wasn’t a lab-leak, except it probably was; the vaccine was 95% effective, except everyone caught covid, and the data was world’s best practice but the FDA fought tooth and nail to stop us seeing it until 2076.

These results are terrible: despite respondents being surrounded by hi-tech cars, phones, food and gadgets which were all impossible without science, only 57% of people now think science has has a “mostly positive” effect. That’s 43% of the population who now think science hurts us as much as it helps (or is even worse).

The good name of science, created by two generations with antibiotics, satellites, and the moon-landing, has been exploited by name-calling parasites.

Pew research released this in November, calling it just “a decline”:

Pew Research

What Pew didn’t say was that these sort of surveys have been going on for years and this was the biggest fall in forty years.

A similar survey set by […]

New deniers eh? One third of UK teenagers think climate change is deliberately exaggerated

By Jo Nova

There is hope: Thirty years of namecalling, propaganda and censorship still isn’t enough

Despite being raised on non stop media propaganda and being drip fed the climate bible in school, one third of teenagers have somehow figured it out anyhow. Even the systematic censorship on Youtube and Google where skeptics are downranked, delegitimized and demonetized hasn’t stopped the truth getting through to some of the most impressionable and vulnerable minds.

Because this blasphemy is shocking to Guardian staff, that students might think for themselves, they can only report it with a ready-made excuse loaded into the subheader. It’s Youtube’s fault.

Helena Horton, The Guardian writes:

Third of UK teenagers believe climate change exaggerated, report shows

YouTube criticised for amplifying lies about the climate with disinformation videos watched by young people

A third of UK teenagers believe climate change is “exaggerated”, a report has found, as YouTube videos promoting a new kind of climate denial aimed at young people proliferate on the platform.

So it’s not that climate models have been pathetically wrong for their whole lives, and many of their parents and grandparents don’t believe the climate religion either — this is […]

Republican confidence in science fell dramatically in the wake of the pandemic

By Jo Nova

For most of our lives, scientists have been among the most trusted community leaders. But not any more.

For nearly fifty years, more than four out of ten Americans said they had a “great deal of confidence” in the people running our institutions of science. This was the strongest possible answer people could give. But all that has changed in the last few years with public opinion on science now splitting along political lines. Faith in the institutions of science has collapsed among conservative voters.

The goodwill, the trust and esteem built by things like The Manhattan Project and the Moonshot carried on for decades, but when Covid arrived, and science was the number one public topic of debate, many scientists sat silent on the sidelines. The lab leak theory came and went and then turned out to have been true all along. When ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine could have saved lives, scientists said nothing. When vaccines were sold as “safe and effective”, researchers who knew there were risks, sat on their hands. When borders could have been shut to stop bioweapons, Trump was left on his own. When universities failed the nation, scientists mostly sided with the […]

62% of UK say reducing bills is more important than carbon targets

By Jo Nova

After thirty years of propaganda the people aren’t buying the crisis. The UK Sun polled 2,000 people and found that 60% think the government should be *prioritizing* a reduction in their bills rather than worrying about reaching Net Zero. Barely 20% thought Net Zero was more important — and they were presumably the only ones who could still afford to pay their bills.

The bigger problem is that it’s not democracy. The UniParty just don’t seem interested in winning votes. They’re not fighting “over the centre”, they’re fighting over the most extreme left 20%.

And ponder that these dismal results come despite 65 per cent of people thinking Net Zero is somehow a useful idea. Imagine what the polls would be like when people find out that carbon dioxide feeds the world and the Sun controls the climate?

Hat tip to NetZeroWatch

Sun poll shows clueless MPs have NO idea of the pain policies like Net Zero inflict on ordinary Brit families

by Harry Cole,

A massive 62 per cent told a YouGov poll for The Sun that getting prices down is more important than achieving carbon neutral status by […]

CEO’s are not boasting about their Woke “achievements” like they used to

By Jo Nova

Corporate leaders are not bragging about their environmental wins or diversity hires with the same fervour they had a year ago. Some of this is due to pressure from the 23 US state Governors who are asking CEO’s sharp and pointy questions about anti-trust behaviour and fiduciary duty and campaigning on anti-Woke platforms. And some of this is due to the backlash against disastrous Bud-Light and Target campaigns.

Companies Quiet Diversity and Sustainability Talk Amid Culture War Boycotts

Mark Maurer, Wall Street Journal

Companies’ mentions of green and social initiatives during earnings calls have fallen off sharply in recent quarters, reversing a more boastful approach taken over the past few years amid intensifying pressure from some investors and conservative activists. Finance chiefs and other executives have significantly quieted down in public settings about their environmental and employee diversity efforts …

Charting the rise and fall of public “Woke” declarations in the corporate world.

Peak ESG may be behind us… WSJ

The backlash is coming from several angles — investors, conservative groups, political leaders.

It’s a good sign democracy and free markets are not dead yet. But these companies are probably pursuing […]

Great Barrier Reef in record coral cover but 97% of Australians don’t know it

By Jo Nova

Only 3% of Australians know the true state of the Reef!

Ten years ago, coral cover on the Great Barrier Reef hit record lows. The news has been full of dire reports of bleaching ever since, but quietly, a phenomenal recovery was blossoming across the full 2,000 kilometer span of the reef. Last year coral cover hit a record high — better than any year since records began in 1986. Corals are thriving but Australians are spending half a billion dollars to save them?

I’m a Director of the Australian Environment Foundation, and after this new record, I worked with fellow Director Peter Ridd to arrange surveys to find out whether Australians had heard the news. What we found was a nation mis-informed.

I am honored to issue the report below. Please forward it on, send letters to the Editors and tell the world. Consider joining the AEF to help us get more science into environmental debates.

— Jo

_________________________________________

 

Great Barrier Reef in record coral cover but 97% of Australians don’t know it

Australian Environment Foundation (AEF)

23 April 2023

[…]

Democrats, independents and young Americans losing faith that climate change is “man made”

By Jo Nova

Are young Americans growing out of the climate religion?

In a healthy sign, young adults aged 18 to 29 are much more skeptical now than they were five years ago. A 17% decline in the number who think climate change was mostly or entirely man-made is a major fall, especially in a large survey of 5,400 people.

Across all age groups American belief that climate change was mostly or entirely man-made fell from 60% in 2018 down to 49% in 2023. The fall was almost entirely in Democrat and Independent voters.

Republican voters were much more skeptical to start with and haven’t changed at all, which EPIC described as “stable” because that sounded a lot better than “skeptical”.

Source: EPIC (Energy Policy Institute of Chicago)

 

Democrats are persuaded by scientists, storms, and hot weekends, Republicans, not so much:

Source: EPIC

Suggestible people who are primed to see hurricanes, floods and heatwaves as evidence of man-made climate change will believe they were influenced by the weather. Obviously, it’s circular too: those primed to believe a normal downpour is a rain-bomb will also believe they have experienced “extreme events”.

 

Source: EPIC

[…]

Half of Americans believe the media is trying to mislead them, and the people running the USA are “unknown” to voters

By Jo Nova

Most people know

It’s an extraordinary poll and a nation unravelling.

Two thirds of American’s don’t trust the media. Half even think they are actively lying, and don’t care about their audience. Nine out of ten people think the media is politically biased. As the trust evaporates, people are switching off the national news. A vast majority of people on one side of the political spectrum now view the media unfavorably, and while that number had jumped in Republican and Independent voters in the last three years — it is even rising in Democrat voters too.

The Knight/Gallup — Trust in Media and Democracy poll reveals, bizarrely, that more than half of the nation thinks the people who really “run” the country are not known to voters. I don’t think I’ve even seen pollsters ask that question before. Effectively then, it follows that nearly six out of ten people think that Joe Biden is not the one running the country, and the same goes for Congress. Barely one person in five thinks voters are choosing the decision-makers.

It’s not just trust in the media that’s collapsing, but trust in the government, and even faith in the workings […]

70% of Australians don’t even want to spend $1 a week on “Net Zero”

The most devastating thing about this survey is not what it says about energy policy but what it says about our democracy.

70% of Australians think energy policy should be about reliable cheap supply, not about stopping storms, and 70% don’t want to even spend $1 a week saving the world from climate change. Despite this, neither major party stands for that 70%.

Imagine what our election campaign would look like if both parties were trying to win over voters?

The Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) asked 1,007 Australians “How much would you personally be willing to pay each year for Australia to reduce its emissions to zero by 2050?” And 42% said “Nothing at all”. Nine out of ten Australians don’t want to spend much at all. Yet somehow both major political parties agree to spend billions every year on a transition we don’t have to have.

We don’t have to have wind or solar power, big batteries, big interconnectors, big Snowy 2.0 and we don’t have to buy international carbon credits.

Bear in mind Australians are not paying $50 or $100 a year on climate bills, they’re paying $1,300 a year.*

So state and federal governments are spending […]

Herding the Democrat school of fish toward civil war

Hypothetically, if someone were trying to divide a nation this survey is Paydirt

It’s almost like a team is winding up the young and impressionable, stoking their fears. Republican Voters worry about policies, but Democratic voters are just scared of Republicans.

h/t David for the “school of fish”.

Look at the top four concerns:

Matt Margolis, PJ Media

According to Kristen Soltis Anderson, the cofounder of Echelon Insights, Democrat voters are more concerned about “Donald Trump’s supporters” than anything else.

Democrats

Democrats are less concerned about policy issues than they are about people with whom they disagree politically. To them, Trump supporters are more dangerous than Islamic terrorists, a more pressing issue than gun violence, and even more important than issues that affect their various constituencies, like discrimination against LGBT Americans, sexism, student debt, alleged voter suppression, etc.

To these voters, Trump supporters are a bigger issue than all of those and more. Imagine being a store owner minding your own business and thinking that the Democrat voters around you think you are a bigger issue facing this country than anything else, even more than the issues that directly affect […]

Bureau of Met reads tea leaves and finds warming at Horn Island that no thermometer can see

Ken Stewart has been looking at the mysterious pattern of temperatures on Horn Island –– right at the top of Cape York Australia. It’s almost as far north as things get in Australia. There was no thermometer there before 1995, so the Bureau of Meteorology has rattled the nearest tea-leaves to find out how warm it was.

The towns listed on the map are its nearest neighbours. “Near”, in the Australian sense, meaning loosely within 500 kilometers.

Horn Island and it’s nearest neighbours

This, below, is the way 70 years of temperature dregs roll at all those sites.

This is what the Bureau of Meteorology sees (note the scale has changed on the temp axis). That’s two degrees of warming in far north Queensland.

So the average minimum temperature now looks half a degree cooler in 1960 than what your lying eyeballs suggest.

Ken goes into much more detail and deserves our thanks for bothering to try to unpack the mysterious merging of thermometer records in at the BoM department of Tasseomancy.

Visit his site: Garbage In, Garbage Out- Horn Island

 

10 out of 10 based on 59 ratings […]

Most people in the West are still skeptics of climate change and the IPCC position

A large Yougov Climate Change survey has questioned about 1,000 people in 30 different countries. Despite being loaded and biased towards the IPCC religious position, and despite 30 years of non-stop propaganda, most of the population in major western countries are not obedient believers in the IPCC message.

h/t GWPF

Who do this half of the population vote for? Which mainstream major party even says humans are only partly responsible?

If political parties represented the voters, one of the two major parties in every country would be willing to say “the IPCC exaggerates the problem”. Only the USA (at the moment) has a leader that doesn’t repeat the IPCC line, even though many Republicans still do. In most western nations both sides of politics are competing for the 40 – 50% of the population that thinks humans are mainly responsible. As Donald Trump, Tony Abbott, Doug Ford and Jason Kenny show, most voters are easily inspired to vote against the climate dogma.

These numbers are typical of bigger and better studies over the years. Though the UK figure shows more believers than an ITV Newrs poll in 2014 showed. (Fully 62% of the UK were skeptical then and may […]

New poll: 54% of Australians are still skeptics of man-made climate catastrophe

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 […]

New study: Conservatives not fooled by “extreme weather” in media but liberals suffer imaginary droughts

Good news. There is hope for average Americans; not so much for academics.

It’s bad news for the Eco Worriers though who were hoping that constant displays of extreme weather would finally convince conservatives — a flood here, a Cat 6 there, a hottest first Sunday of Lent. It all washes over Conservatives. The weather-porn won’t convince them.

But the most interesting and novel discovery here is buried in the third paragraph from the bottom and barely mentioned. The researchers are only interested in how to “convince conservatives” and not remotely concerned that the media may be misleading a lot of the population by hyping up the weather.

Apparently media propaganda has convinced 40% of the US population that they’ve lived through a drought that didn’t happen and 10% think they’ve lived through a hurricane that wasn’t.

I graphed the differences between perceived events and real ones. Below, red columns show the percentage of people who said they had lived through droughts, tornadoes, hurricanes and floods. Blue columns show the percentage of those same people who were living in counties which NOAA said had actually experienced those events.

A lot of people think they’ve been in a drought or […]

Study: Skeptics are more environmental — believers do less but want government to solve it instead

Ain’t that the way? When it comes to taking individual action, skeptics are more environmental than the people who call themselves “environmental”.

A new psych study shows that skeptics are more likely to use cloth shopping bags, catch public transport and buy eco-friendly items. Hall et al somehow got 600 people to fill in a survey up to seven times in one year about their belief in “climate change” and their self-reported action. They found there are three types of people: the “highly concerned” about climate change, the “cautiously worried” and the “skeptical”. The “highly convinced” believers may tell the world we have to act, but they were more likely to use plastic bags themselves and drive their car. They were more likely to want government policies to magically solve the problem. Skeptics meanwhile, were more passionately against government meddling than any group was on any issue. It was the single most definitive score.

Skeptics (blue) were more likely to reuse shopping bags, buy eco-friendly things, and catch the bus and train. The highly concerned (red) were more likely to recycle goods and otherwise support government action.

 

Researchers were pretty much baffled by their results and admitted as […]

Only half of meteorologists think human emissions are major cause of climate change

In 2016 67% of meteorologists said that humans have caused most or all climate change and The Guardian headlined that there was a Growing Consensus among Meteorologists. In 2017 that fell to only 49%. The Guardian said nothing.

….

In 2016 29% of meteorologists thought climate change was largely or entirely man-made, but that fell to only 15% this year.

Figure how this result fits with the idea of the overwhelming evidence and 97% consensus. Which group on the planet after climate scientists should be the second profession to “get it” — how about meteorologists?

So either:

1. meteorologists are really stupid, or

2. meteorologists know how hard it is to predict the climate.

8.7 out of 10 based on 88 ratings […]

Despite record hottest year even a loaded vague climate survey shows 61% don’t agree with experts

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 […]

42% of US adults don’t want to pay even $12 a year to stop climate change

This is the devastating question few surveyors are willing to ask. Survey teams usually use mindless motherhood questions instead, like whether we “believe” in climate change. (Who doesn’t?) Or they ask if we want clean energy… (doh, like I want my energy dirty?) But the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago and The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research actually did a nationally representative poll of 1097 adults.

Everyone wants a nice climate, but hardly anyone wants to pay for it:

When asked whether they would support a monthly fee on their electric bill to combat climate change, 42 percent of respondents are unwilling to pay even $1. Twenty-nine percent would pay $20, an amount roughly equivalent to what the federal government estimates the damages from climate change would be on each household. And, 20 percent indicate they are willing to pay $50 per month. Party affiliation is the main determinant of how much people are willing to pay, not education, income, or geographic location. Democrats are consistently willing to pay more than Republicans.

The answer has flummoxed people. Sam Ori in the Wall St Journal can’t make sense of it:

This is […]

Most Canadians are skeptics, and CBC accidentally says so, then “edits” story

Oops! CBC (the Canadian version of the BBC and ABC) have been caught out editing a story to make it more politically correct. CBC’s political bias is accidentally on display. The original message revealed a sacred truth that must not be spoken. How would most Canadians feel about being forced to pay money to change the weather if they knew most other Canadians also thought it was a waste of billions? As far as I can tell, the updated version was a complete rewrite of the first half of the article. There appear to be a lot of changes.

The unsurprising news is that 56% of Canadians are skeptics — which is very similar to all other surveys which show that 62% of Brits are 62% skeptical. As are 54% of Australians. Fully third of the US are so skeptical they think it’s a total hoax.

The survey:

Is Earth getting warmer mostly because of human activities? 56% say NO.

Amazingly 39% of Canadians said the next question that they don’t think humans are even partially responsible.

Earth is getting warmer partly or mostly because of human activities. 39% say NO.

So CBC initially wrote a […]

Great Barrier Reef an icon that half of Australia never visits. Climate change scary as “litter”

Another survey that proves Australians still tick “yes” to motherhood statements. (Especially when there is no cost involved, and all choices are “Free”)

Survey shows Aussies’ love and concern for their Great Barrier Reef

A James Cook University researcher has found more than three quarters of Australians regard the Great Barrier Reef as part of their national identity and nearly 90 per cent believe it is under threat from climate change.

But what the media-release doesn’t say is that after 25 years of hearing how the climate apocalypse is coming, people think climate change is going to be slightly worse than beach litter.

In terms of extreme threats, 6% more people think Climate Change will be worse than flotsam and jetsam. As a multibillion dollar marketing campaign endorsed by the UN, WMO, IMF, and western media — that’s got to hurt. Climate change is not much more scary than litter, ships, or runaway fertilizer.

Figure 3: Respondent perceptions of threats to the Great Barrier Reef as scored on a 10-point scale (1=not at all threatening and 10=extremely threatening). The “Top 2%” refers to the percentage of respondents […]