Britain, a nation of climate sceptics? Really?
Climate communicator and academic at Imperial College Dr Alice Bell has been examinging in detail the British Social Attitudes survey that came out earlier this week.
The survey included a section on British attitudes towards the environment, and showed what appears to be a decline in Environmental concern in the British public – in 2010 37% said many claims about environmental threats were “exaggerated”, up from 24% in 2000.
Climate skeptic blog Watts up with That posted it under the header ‘We’re Winning The Battle For Hearts And Minds’.
As we have pointed out in the past, (examining if people are ‘bored’ by climate change, on looking at climate skepticism in detail, or on tea party members and their attitudes towards climate) polling requires careful interpretation, and Alice Bell has looked closely at the section in question. She finds some reasons to take the numbers seriuously, but also some unanswered questions about how the researchers came to their conclusions –
…I did think data around whether people agreed with the statement “Every time we use coal or gas or oil we contribute to climate change” was something climate communications people should worry about. In 2000, 35% said this statement was definitely true, 46% said it was probably true and 12% said definitely/ probably not true. For 2010 the results change to 20%, 51% and 17% respectively. There were also marked drops in concerns over the impact of cars and agriculture.
As the report says, this might be due to people thinking they’ve been partly solved by “cleaner” technologies; it’s harder to explain away the impact of coal/ gas/ oil on climate statement quite so easily though. If you want something cheering, maybe age will help though: the sharpest drop in people agreeing that climate change was dangerous came from people 55+. This was down 13% from 56% to 43% with over 55-64 bracket and down 19% from 47% to 28% with over 65â?²s, but only down 3% and 1 % respectively to 48% with 18-34s and 15-54s (p103). I’m not sure 48% agreement is a particularly good score though anyway.
What most online coverage from skeptics and the media has focused on has been the link the BSA researchers make between the ‘climategate’ episode and resulting media coverage, and a rise in climate scepticism. The blog is interesting on that point – again, suggesting that things are more complicated than the top line of the polling:
One final thing that bugged me about this report was that it didn’t really examine how and where people got their information about the environment from, and yet still felt able to make loose connections between the timing of Climategate and the apparent rise in scepticism. From the final pages: “we conclude that media coverage may make a difference – not least ‘new’ media and the internet ‘blogosphere’ where unfounded opinion can sometimes be favoured over scientific fact” (p106).
The impact of the media on people’s understanding, reasoning and framing of any issue, perhaps in particular ones including esoteric expertise like climate science, is incredibly complex, and the BSA report writers should have known better. They should certainly know better than to make loose comments about unfounded opinion on blogosphere (which is a large, diverse and porous area of activity).
I also don’t see how they can look at a change over ten years and say it has to be something that happened in 2009, no matter how much media ink was spilled. To their credit they do also say it could also be matter of fatigue and refer to financial cost, etc. Personally, I’d like to see them acknowledge that they don’t know and call for investment in more research here.