The New Neo

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.