Apparently, the MSM coverup of Climategate has worked
Jon A. Krosnick is a professor of communication, political science and psychology at Stanford University. As such, he no doubt knows how to spin a story, and he has done a bit of that in an op-ed he wrote that recently appeared in the NY Times, in which he cited a new poll indicating a large majority of Americans still believe in anthropogenic global warming.
It’s not difficult to check out Krosnick’s statements against the poll itself, because the Times has very thoughtfully supplied a link to it.
So, let’s see. Krosnick states:
When respondents were asked if they thought that the earth’s temperature probably had been heating up over the last 100 years, 74 percent answered affirmatively. And 75 percent of respondents said that human behavior was substantially responsible for any warming that has occurred.
Sounds as though belief in AGW is pretty overwhelming and unequivocal. But look at the actual figures, and they seem to suggest something more muted and less clear. For example, after ascertaining in question Q13 that 74% of respondents believe that global warming itself is a reality, the pollsters then asked, in question Q14, “[assuming global warming is happening] do you think a rise in the world’s temperature is being [would be] caused by…” and then gives several possible choices. The answers ran as follows: “things people do” 30%; “natural causes” 25%; “both equally” 45%.
So a roughly equal number of people (30%, 25%) felt that warming was either caused completely by human activities or caused completely by natural forces. Anyone who believed global warming to be some sort of mix was not given a choice of an answer that expressed any possible degree of mixing except “equal.” So anyone who felt there was any possibility of even some slight degree of human-caused warming would be likely to choose that answer as the closest approximation of his/her beliefs. This would tend to overstate the scope and intensity of the belief in AGW.
The rest of the survey offers few surprises. People think industrial pollution should be limited (there are many reasons to favor this that have nothing to do with AGW, by the way). They are not in favor of higher taxes to do this, but are in favor of tax credits. And so on.
The Krosnick piece discusses Climategate and its revelations as follows:
Growing public skepticism has, in recent months, been attributed to news reports about e-mail messages hacked from the computer system at the University of East Anglia in Britain (characterized as showing climate scientists colluding to silence unconvinced colleagues) and by the discoveries of alleged flaws in reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Our new survey discredited this claim in multiple ways. First, we found no decline in Americans’ trust in environmental scientists: 71 percent of respondents said they trust these scientists a moderate amount, a lot or completely, a figure that was 68 percent in 2008 and 70 percent in 2009. Only 9 percent said they knew about the East Anglia e-mail messages and believed they indicated that climate scientists should not be trusted, and only 13 percent of respondents said so about the I.P.C.C. reports’ alleged flaws.
So it seems that not many people in the survey lost faith in climate scientists as a result of the Climategate brouhaha. But Krosnick fails to mention a statistic that especially interested me, which is how many survey respondents had actually heard of Climategate in the first place.
This answer should be no surprise: relatively few, it turns out. If you look at question Q53, about whether respondents remember hearing anything in the news during the past six months about emails sent by climate scientists, 68% do not remember as compared to 32% who do. In the next question, when the 32% who did remember something about it were asked if anything about that story indicated whether climate scientists should be trusted or not, 12% said it indicated nothing about it, 9% said trusted, and 9% said not trusted.
This should be no surprise, either, considering how the MSM virtually ignored (or, if they did cover it, “swiftboated”) the Climategate story. Most people have neither read the story nor heard about it, and of the ones who did I would guess that many of them mostly read reports pooh-poohing it, exonerating the scientists, or even talking about whether the imaginary “hacker” who revealed the emails should be punished.
The situation is very similar (and even a bit worse) when a similar set of questions was asked about the mistakes made by the IPC in issuing its reports (see questions Q54 and Q54b). This time fully 76% had heard nothing of this versus 24% who had heard something. Of those who had somehow managed to ferret out (by hook or by crook) news of the mistakes in the IPC reports, only 4% believe the news indicates they should trust in the IPC reports, 13% believe they should not trust them, and 6% say the news of the errors does not indicate anything either way about whether the reports should be trusted.
It would have been instructive, as well, to have interviewed the people who trust and those who distrust and to have discovered whether their views had changed as a result of reading about Climategate or the IPC mistakes. But even without that information, this survey shows why the MSM is so intent on hiding news it does not like: we can reasonably conclude that coverups still work. Even in this day of alternate news sources, if the MSM doesn’t report something, most people don’t hear about it.
A pedant writes…should it not be anthropogenic rather than anthropomorphic?
peter horne: I keep making that error for some reason. Will fix (maybe I should just stick with “AGW” in the future 🙂 ).
most importantly, the government policy did not change.
All the numerous Green initiatives, programs, projects and subsequent “stimulus” money that go into “transportation and energy spending”, labeled as progressive, caring about and mediating long-term consequences of environmental disaster are not only in place, they have doubled and tripled.
NY is still laboring under our despicable mayor’s plan of “0 Emission city”. Despite the city going broke, despite recession and all that – he’s not touching the sacred ‘Green” cow.
Good points. I think the earth is warmer and I don’t think people had 0 to do with it… and I still think, overall, climate change is a scam.
This conclusion abour workability of coverup is premature. There are other polls, that led to very different results. See
http://wattsupwiththat.com/
(scroll down to relevant comparison)
Sergey: could you post a link to the relevant polls?
If you read the Krosnick piece, he posits the Stanford poll as a counter to recent polls that say differently about belief in AGW. So he does acknowledge that there’s a trend towards dropping belief, but he critiques the way the questions were asked in those polls.
What interested me most, however, about the Stanford poll, was the data on how many (actually, how few) people had heard of Climategate and the IPC report errors. I haven’t seen any other stats on that.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/25/pew-poll-global-warming-dead-last-down-from-last-year/
http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2009/images/12/07/rel18e.pdf
Krosnick did his pseudo poll (2009) before Climategate had made its real impact (2010). I think people are a little more aware of Climategate than what he would like to believe.
Another barometer: Senate Joint Resolution 26. It is being voted on today and:
“This resolution will stop the EPA’s astonishing effort to regulate the whole U.S. economy by shoehorning global warming regulations into the 1970 Clean Air Act.”
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2010/06/reining_in_the_epa.html
(Great picture in Tatyana’s link: pg 10 of the 2009 emissions report (pdf): Beautiful picture of NY.)
http://gatewaypundit.firstthings.com/2010/05/less-than-one-third-of-us-meteorologists-believe-global-warming-is-manmade-video/
I don’t believe the nine percent. Unless the 1000 adults were mysteriously chosen at random in certain zipcodes.
Heres another taste of what the GFK research group that did the Stanford poll felt they needed to say on an American image survey they also conducted…
“The results suggest that the new U.S. administration has been well received abroad and the American electorate’s decision to vote in President Obama has given the United States the status of the world’s most admired country.”
link
http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/america-is-now-the-most-admired-country-globally—jumping-to-the-top-of-the-2009-anholt-gfk-roper-nation-brands-indexsm-63522002.html
The complicity of the press and their durantyism is legendary..
The People Who Gave the Soviet Union a Pass
By Arnold Beichman
hnn.us/articles/1851.html
all this is is scientific socialism (communism) and the end justifies the means use of ‘science’ to provide reasons for people to give up their own goals, and adopt the ends the leaders want, whether the follower is conscious of such or not.
Never before have so many academics been proven by events and by internal Soviet revelations to have been so abysmally wrong in virtually everything they wrote about the Soviet Union or Marxism-Leninism. Few people are aware of what the majority of these apologist Sovietologists, particularly in the United States, were writing and teaching about the Soviet Union and Marxism-Leninism when Stalin was at the apogee of his appalling power.
all one has to do is read the policy papers of the club of rome and other such groups to read about how they cooked up such ideas way back just after the war… in those papers they talk in vague ways of what kinds of things they could push…
The intellectual fiasco of the Sovietology “left,” who camouflaged their ideology with the robes of academicism, should not be forgotten. Present and future generations should see how the Great Hoax was perpetrated.
and now in the west the words of Cholerton resonates for us and england as it did for russia
“In Russia, everything is true except the facts.”
curtis: the poll Krosnick is referring to in this article, the one I linked to, was done the first week of June, 2010.
Thanks for the correction. I always appreciate being straight on the facts.
I’ve been doing my own poll. One colleague didn’t know what “hockey stick” was.
“When respondents were asked if they thought that the earth’s temperature probably had been heating up . . .”
It amazes me that supposedly intelligent people keep pointing to public opinion as though it somehow validates (or, God forbid, is) scientific reality. To see how ridiculous this is, let’s try re-framing the argument:
A newly discovered 16th century poll indicates that 90% of Europeans believed that the sun moves around the earth. One person was quoted as saying “It’s obvious. The sun rises in the East. Why would we say the sun ‘rises’ if it was not moving across the sky?”
So obviously Copernicus and Galileo were wrong, and if people believe that the earth is warming due to human activity, then it must be so!
Although there was a Climategate, the claims for global warning aren’t going away. The powers that be (Agenda 21) have invested considerable sums, effort and time. Since 1992 and the adoption of Agenda 21 by the U.N., information that refutes “sustainability” becomes less and less effective as the brainwashed become a larger segment of society. If you don’t know, it sounds so reasonable and unnconnected to the wild claims of those who shout “socialism” and “treason.”
Look at questions 33a and 33b. 33b is worded very differently, but offers only answers exactly the same as 33a. This survey is a piece of propoganda trash.
As far as I’m concerned, anyone who still spouts AGW junk proves to me that they are not well read. In fact, they are ignorant.
When trying to present “wattsupwiththat”-style facts to my so-called intellectual friends, they always act as if AGW is proven or (hedging their bets) possible. When I point out that most of the data has been corrupted by the lure of millions of dollars in government grants, I get the “bug-eye,” and I know that it’s time to change the subject. So I do.
Conclusion: ignore the so-called intellectuals and look at the actual data. Ditto “wind power,” “green energy,” etc. When one presses people with facts, they reveal their ignorance rather quickly. Yesterday I met a believer in windmills off the coast of Evanston, IL. I asked her how many homes she thought these windmills would heat. The “bug-eye” response, which means “I don’t know, but I’m not going to admit it, you Earth-hater.”
The facts about the ridiculously overblown climategate affair are easily located:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/Climategate-CRU-emails-hacked.htm
The fact the story got more than a passing mention in the media disproves what you are saying. It really wasn’t much of a story and did nothing to reduce the overwhelming evidence that climate change is real. All the denial and wishful thinking in the world isn’t going to make it go away. Though I still hope I am proven wrong on this one.
Simon, actually nobody denies that climat change is real: climate always change, one way or other. Real problems are causes and the change, its limits and our ability to predict or influence these changes. There is nothing clear or obvious about them. There is a lot of climate research, but no climate science as such emerged yet. To put it bluntly, we know nothing and even do not know what we do not know.
Global warming global socialism is the perfect leftist front group uber-deception mega-lie and gravy train con job for BIG MONEY, POWER and CONTROL. The con man head of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in Britain, Phil Jones, has made I think around 25 MILLION dollars in tax payer funded government grants since 1990. Not bad, but climate chump change compared to Al Gore’s around 100 MILLION dollars since 2001.
Climate change IS man-made…up!
It was the MSM’s intention to treat Climategate as a non-story. Only people who use the Internet for news and opinion are well informed about the issues. Unfortunately, it has worked. The progressives just continue using AGW as their excuse for taking control of our society as if it were gospel truth. Fortunately, the economic recovery has been blunted by Obama’s anti-buisiness policies. No recovery means angry voters at the polls in November. IMO most will vote for fiscally conservative candidates. If so, we will be on the way to stopping this power grab using AGW as the raison de etre.