Comments on: Changing Opinions on Energy and Climate Change

By: L Hamilton

L Hamilton — Thu, 22 Oct 2015 13:45:58 +0000

“Suffering drought or floods or snowstorms should be a motivation to act”

That’s an important, and testable, proposition. We’re working on it.

By: L Hamilton

L Hamilton — Thu, 22 Oct 2015 13:44:14 +0000

Better to light a candle ….
Here IMHO is a more meaningful graph tracking the percent who think climate change is happening now, caused mainly by human activities. The main curve follows quarterly New Hampshire state surveys; individual TIE fighters mark results from 3 national polls, by different organizations, that asked the same question (coming in pretty close to NH, so it’s not a bad proxy). All percentages are graphed with their 95% confidence intervals. There appears to be a slight but statistically significant rise over this period.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v224/Chiloe/Climate/synth_time1.png

Details here:
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0138208

By: zebra

zebra — Thu, 22 Oct 2015 13:20:35 +0000

I don’t think anyone will disagree that L Hamilton deserves much thanks for some very nice work.

So let’s apply it. If 55% accept the consensus, and only 35% don’t, the political goal is motivation to action, not education. You aren’t really going to change many of the 35%; they are psychologically incapable of it. As I said in the previous thread, we need to move on in the public discourse.

So, to repeat my mantra, first, stop hedging about extreme events. Honestly tell people that these are manifestations of the distorted climate system we have created.

People relate to local effects, and they relate to local mitigation efforts, and if necessary, to local adaptation.

Suffering drought or floods or snowstorms should be a motivation to act; at the national level, changes can be made to aid in acting at the local level. On the energy front, mitigation and adaptation can overlap.

Let’s not let the opportunity be lost.

By: L Hamilton

L Hamilton — Thu, 22 Oct 2015 01:32:43 +0000

Trouble with the first question, and many others of its type, is that it does not distinguish whether climate change is believed to have mainly anthropogenic or natural causes. *That* is the great sociopolitical divide, and key both to mitigation (should we reduce greenhouse gases?) and adaptation (do we expect future warming etc., or just randomness and cycles?).

In 35 individual surveys (about 28,000 interviews) analyzed for a recent paper, we asked people whether climate change is happening now, caused mainly by human activities (~55% nationally), is it happening now, but caused mainly by natural forces (~35%), is it not happening now (~5%) or I don’t know (~5%). Asking about climate change without specifying a main cause amounts to mushing together the first group with some fraction of the second. That leads to a higher percentage, but not an interpretable one.

The paper, not paywalled, is here:
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0138208

By: dean

dean — Wed, 21 Oct 2015 17:10:42 +0000

Can we have error bars, or at least a sample size or confidence interval?

Some information:

With a sample size of 2,019 and weighting efficiency of 50.3 percent, the overall margin of error is 3.1 percentage points at the widest interval.

from here (bottom of page)
http://news.utexas.edu/2015/10/20/views-of-key-energy-issues-are-shaped-by-partisan-politics

By: Young CC Prof

Young CC Prof — Wed, 21 Oct 2015 15:43:51 +0000

Can we have error bars, or at least a sample size or confidence interval? I hate looking at changes with no idea how meaningful they are.

I’m trying to track the information down through the links, but it’s not easy to find at the UT site either.