Noise of the Crowd

Two weeks ago, Labour’s lead over the Tories fell several points over a weekend. It’s still big enough to give Labour a decent majority, but it’s the first sustained shift of this size since the Tories’ omnishambles last spring.

There’s been some speculation about why the polls changed. Was it because Thatcher’s death reminded a bunch of people that they loved the Tories after all; because the welfare debate hurt Labour; because Tony Blair was nasty about Ed Miliband in the New Statesman; or was it the belated unwinding of the gains that Labour made in 2012?

The reason the question of why it happened is important* is that some changes are only temporary – usually when there’s been an external news story or a well-received political setpiece. But politics news that says something new and fundamental about one party can produce a more lasting realignment. This is what happened after the omnishambles budget – and it’s what some are saying is happening to Labour with the welfare debate (in a bad way).

Firstly, on the headline numbers, there was a drop in Labour’s lead between the 12^th and 15^th April. Excluding a couple of outliers**, Labour went from 11.4 ahead in the YouGov*** polls before that weekend to 7.5 in the polls since then.  While Lib Dem and UKIP scores haven’t changed much, the Tories have gone up a couple of points and Labour have fallen about the same amount:

The detail of who has switched might give us a clue about why things have changed.

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This is the latest in the series of blogs on Carbon Brief’s new energy and climate change poll. It was written by Ros Donald and Christian Hunt and the original is available here.

Are scientists, communicators and policymakers too preoccupied about whether people ‘believe’ in human-caused climate change or not? Polling by Carbon Brief shows that while people may not be sure whether humans are warming the planet, the majority still wants action now to abate climate change.

According to polling carried out for Carbon Brief by Opinium, 89 per cent of respondents said they believe climate change is happening. Only six  per cent said they did not believe the climate is changing.

But opinion was divided when it came to what’s causing climate change. The majority – 56 per cent – said humans are causing the warming, but a significant number – around 33 per cent – believe it’s mostly down to natural causes.

Question: Which of the following statements do you agree with most? Climate change is happening and is mostly caused by humans; Climate change is happening and is mostly caused by natural processes; Climate change is not happening.

How significant is this? We found that despite the confusion about what’s causing global warming, 67 per cent of respondents want action to abate emissions now. That’s compared to 13 per cent who said we don’t need to worry about doing anything now and 12 per cent who said it would never be a problem.

Question: Which of the following statements do you agree with most?

So whatever people’s beliefs about the causes of climate change, they still want us to do something about it.

Previous study

This result mirrors the outcome of  an Angus Reid poll, released just after the Copenhagen climate summit and the leak of climate scientists’ emails from the University of East Anglia in 2010. These events are widely reported in the media as being the cause of much skepticism in the public.

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This post is the latest in the series on Carbon Brief’s energy and climate change poll. It was written by Ros Donald and the original was published here.

People in the UK overwhelmingly trust scientists more than any other source to give them accurate information about climate change, according to a new survey. In contrast, politicians and social media come joint last on the list.

Scientists most trusted

According to a new poll conducted for Carbon Brief by pollsters Opinium ,  69 per cent of those asked agreed that scientists and meteorologists are trustworthy sources of accurate information about climate science. Only seven per cent disagreed that scientists could be trusted to do this.

Next highest came ‘green’ charities such as Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, and BBC journalists and commentators, with 39 per cent and 31 per cent respectively saying they trusted these sources. But these groups divided opinion – 23 per cent don’t trust green charities, and 25 per cent think the BBC can’t be trusted to provide accurate information.

Sharing last place: politicians and social media 

While scientists topped the trust league table, politicians, blogs and social media came bottom. Only seven per cent said they considered politicians to be reliable sources of climate change information – and websites and social didn’t do any better, also scoring a seven per cent rating. 64 per cent said they didn’t think politicians could be trusted to give them accurate information, compared to 53 per cent for social media sources.

Question: How trustworthy do you think the following information sources are in providing you with accurate information about climate change? 

Previous studies

Carbon Brief’s results tally closely with a previous study Ipsos Mori carried out last February for Climate Week of around 1,000 respondents. Asked whose views they trust on climate change, 66 per cent of those asked said they trust scientists the most.

In this survey, celebrities were deemed least trustworthy, with only one per cent professing trust in their views on climate change.

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Carbon Brief’s poll has tons of interesting findings – some of them covered in last week’s blogs.

But as with any apparently new information, it’s useful to put the results in the context of what we’ve seen before. How does the poll fit with what others have shown?

I’m going to pick on three places where it’s interesting to compare the new poll with previous ones.

1. Doubts about climate change aren’t rising

I’ve been banging on about this for a while. Poll after poll is showing that belief that climate change is real and man-made is at the same level it was at before Copenhagen, ‘climategate’, the UK’s cold winters, and the subsequent dip in belief.

The Carbon Brief poll adds yet more weight to this. Compared with a question asked by ICM in ’09 and last year, the results show no movement:

It really is time we stopped saying that belief in climate change is falling.

2. ‘Belief’ in climate doesn’t mean that much anyway

But when I’m not banging on about the fact that climate denial isn’t rising, I can usually be found arguing that focusing on ‘belief’ in climate change misses the point.

One of my favourite charts is from a post-Copenhagen poll that showed that, even among those who said they don’t think global warming has been proven, a majority wanted a reduction in worldwide emissions.

I’ve taken this to indicate there’s a bunch of people who respond to questions about whether they ‘believe’ in climate change as if they’re being asked “are you a tree-hugging leftie who hates business?” – so they say no to that question, but still want the government to do something about climate change.

But is that true? A question in the Carbon Brief poll supports that view, albeit not quite to the extent seen in the Copenhagen poll.

Of those who think climate change or global warming is mostly caused by natural processes (about a third of the total), 45% think that tackling climate change should still be part of the government’s economic programme:

3. There isn’t a big problem with trust in climate scientists

A poll conducted in March ’11 and reported 18 months later by LWEC found that only 38% agreed they trusted climate scientists to tell the truth about climate change.

This prompted soul-searching among those worried about public perceptions of climate change: if even climate scientists aren’t trusted, what hope is there for building support for action to tackle climate change?

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This is the second in the series of posts presenting results from Carbon Brief’s energy and climate change polling. It was written by Christian Hunt and Ros Donald of Carbon Brief and was originally posted here.

Energy bills are going up, and new government analysis which examines why has reignited media attention over the price consumers pay for environmental and social policies. But despite media coverage of ‘green taxes’ on energy bills over the past two years, new polling indicates people place the blame for rising costs at the door of energy companies.

Polling conducted for Carbon Brief by Opinium indicates 48 per cent of around 2,000 respondents believe the main reason energy bills have gone up over the past few years is that energy companies have raised prices to make bigger profits.

What’s pushing energy bills up? 

We’ve written a lot about energy costs – and especially how much government policies aimed at cutting carbon emissions are adding to them – over the past two years. The last two years have seen a determined campaign by the right wing press to link rising energy bills to the government’s green policies.

This has sometimes led to exaggerated claims about the effect of environmental policies on energy bills, and the size of the claimed contribution – as well as the method for calculating it – has varied considerably. More recently the government has tried to pre-empt criticism by breaking down the cost of financing green measures like renewables, presenting them alongside other costs such as wholesale gas prices – which remain the biggest reason for recent price hikes.

We wanted to know if  media coverage of ‘green taxes’ has affected people’s opinions, so we surveyed a sample of 2,000 people to find out what they thought was contributing most to rising household energy bills – and to ask what policies consumers are willing (or otherwise) to pay for.

Asked what they think is the main reason for the increases in consumer gas and electricity prices over the last 12 months, just under half – 48 per cent –  put the blame at the door of energy companies. This result is consistent with a recent poll commissioned  - but not published – by the Sunday Times last October. In that poll, 58 per cent said energy company profits were the biggest contributor to higher energy bills.

Question: What do you think is the main reason for the increases in consumer gas and electricity prices over the last 12 months? 

The second most common reason people cited was a rise in wholesale gas prices – 16 per cent said this was the most important reason why bills are going up. Wholesale gas costs contributed £390 to the average gas bill of £830 according to Ofgem’s figures for this month.

Meanwhile, seven per cent of respondents put the hike down to rising inflation, and another seven per cent blamed increased government taxes to help fund investment in renewable energy such as wind turbines.

What would you pay for green policies?

We also wanted to examine the extent to which people felt the government should prioritise spending on policies focused on cutting carbon emissions, and initiatives aimed at increasing the UK’s energy security.

The polling found a fairly even split between people who would pay more for climate change policies and those who would prefer not to.

40 per cent of respondents said the government should continue to invest in new energy sources for the foreseeable future, to help slow down climate change, even if this means energy prices rising. Meanwhile, 45 per cent said that in difficult economic times, we should be using the cheapest energy sources we can, even if they are less likely to prevent climate change.

Question: Which of the following statements regarding energy sources do you agree with most? 

Conservative voters appeared to be the most likely to support using the cheapest source of fuel: 52 per cent said they supported the cheapest fuels even if they are less likely to prevent climate change – versus 38 per cent of Conservative voters who said they would be willing to pay more for fuels that would help slow down climate change.

40 per cent of Labour voters said they’d pay more, in contrast to 49 per cent who said we should stick to the cheapest fuel source. Lib Dems were most likely to support investment in low carbon energy, even if it led to higher costs; 32 per cent said the government should choose the cheapest fuel source.

Energy security

If the question was about maintaining energy security rather than addressing climate change slightly more people appeared to be willing to pay more. 47 per cent of respondents agreed that the government should invest in new energy sources for the foreseeable future, to help reduce reliance on importing foreign fuel, even if this means energy prices rising.

In contrast, 39 per cent said the UK should use the cheapest sources of fuel, even if it means the country is more reliant on fuel imports.

Question: Which of the following statements regarding energy sources do you agree with most? 

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This is the first blog on the results of Carbon Brief’s energy and climate change poll. The article was written by Ros Donald and Christian Hunt of Carbon Brief, and the original is posted here.

When asked whether the government should invest money in climate change or economic growth, the largest group of respondents said they would prefer that it treated both as a priority, according to new polling.

Polling by Opinium for Carbon Brief suggests that the majority of people believe it is possible for the government to promote economic growth and tackle climate change at the same time. 41 per cent of those asked believed there was no contradiction between the two.

That’s compared to 19 per cent who believe the government should invest money into preventing climate change, even if this means a slower economic recovery. However 31 per cent said the government should be doing everything it can to promote economic growth, even if it means tackling climate change is a lower priority.

Question: Which of the following statements regarding climate change do you agree with most?

The great thing about reporting other people’s polls is there’s always something to complain about.  The question order is biasing the responses, the weighting’s gone wrong, the answer choices don’t make sense.

So I was a bit nervous when Carbon Brief asked me to help them design a poll on energy and climate change. Who would I make snide remarks about when I saw the results?

But there was too much still to find out about what the country makes of climate change: I was never going to say no.

The results are fascinating. To go along with them, this is a brief explanation of why we set up the poll as we did and what we were hoping to find out. The full questionnaire is here.

The question order

A good poll questionnaire takes the shape of a funnel: you start from the general and get more specific.  The aim is to avoid asking anything that influences the result of later questions. For example if you want to find out how much people really care about the UK’s EU membership,  you should ask about which issues, out of any, they consider most important before you say anything about Brussels.

But sometimes you hit a problem, when you have two questions that both need to come before the ‘reveal’.

In this poll, we wanted to ask about aviation and about energy. Do people think about airport expansion in the context of climate change? Do they think about energy prices in the context of wind farms? Since both are climate change-related, neither could be fairly asked once we’d got people thinking about the environment.

Our solution: put aviation first and the energy questions in a separate poll.

Do you believe in climate change? Again?

It’s the most predictable question on the planet. But there are three reasons why it made sense to include it.

Firstly, the question has been asked in dozens of different ways. A simple three-way split (caused by humans / natural / not changing) is my favourite as it doesn’t over-complicate matters for respondents or for people understanding the results. It also allowed us to compare with previous results.

Secondly, a poll in the ‘90s found much greater concern about ‘global warming’ than about ‘climate change’. Is that still true? So we split the sample in half and showed different questions to each half. The results are surprising.

Finally, I’ve spotted before that there are lots of people who say they don’t believe in climate change but still say they want action to stop it. Can we replicate that here?  Again, an interesting result.

We also asked about how people thought the British climate is likely to change and who is trusted to give information about climate change.

Climate change or economic recovery?

The political battle about climate change is no longer whether it exists and whether we should take action to stop it. It’s now about whether taking action will require economic sacrifices, and if so, whether those sacrifices are worth making.

Campaigners, like Friends of the Earth, have been arguing that green industries are already creating jobs, and should get more support from the government.

We tested whether people believe tackling climate change should take a lower priority than promoting growth, and whether they take seriously the idea of a green recovery.

Over the next few days, Carbon Brief is publishing the full results, along with several blogs on different aspects of it (which I’ll cross-post here). I’ll be publishing a second blog next week, comparing Carbon Brief’s results to other polls on climate change. In the meantime, I’ll go back to worrying about whether we got the question order right.

Think of something you would never do. For the sake of an example, let’s call it eating a live cockroach. Now suppose I tell you I’ve done something to make it slightly less unappealing, perhaps coated it in honey. Would you be more or less likely to eat that cockroach?

This is a question type repeatedly used by pollsters. I’m going to show why they should stop using it, and why its results should generally be ignored.

Here’s an example. Last week, Survation did a poll for the Mirror on illegal drugs.* In that poll was a question on whether or not respondents had ever taken drugs, and another on what they would do if drugs were sold guaranteed to be free of contaminants.

The results demonstrate why questions of the format “what would you do if x happened” shouldn’t be taken at face value:

So 32% of people who’ve never taken drugs say they would be less likely to take drugs that were guaranteed not to be contaminated.

Read that again. It suggests that a third of people who’ve never taken drugs are currently a bit tempted to give them a try by the thought that the drugs they aren’t buying might contain a bit of rat poison.

Obviously this is complete rubbish. Almost all of that 32% are making a different point: they would never take drugs, and nothing the pollster can say would make them change their mind.

Logic might dictate that they should be more likely to take drugs if they were a bit safer. But they so strongly don’t want to take drugs, they will give the most negative answer they can regardless of what inducements they’re offered (this is similar to the Twitter response to Tom Chivers’ suggestion that liberals should be more likely to vote Tory because of the gay marriage legislation).

That was an easy one to spot, but sometimes the silliness of the result isn’t so obvious.

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Today’s YouGov poll shows a startling change in attitudes to the EU. The results suggest more people would now vote to stay in the EU than to leave it: 40% staying in against 34% wanting to leave.

That’s a big swing from two months ago, when 49% said they would vote to leave: 17pts ahead of those wanting to stay:

Shifts like these don’t just happen by themselves. But is it real, or is something going on with the polling?

Option 1: a change in opinion

There are grounds for thinking a real shift has happened. The last time ‘vote to stay in’ was this high was December 2011: just after Cameron’s walkout of the EU summit.

At that time, the suggestion that the UK would leave the EU moved from remote to seeming more possible. Perhaps people started responding to the polling question differently: saying “I’d vote to leave the EU” became less of an empty threat.

Maybe that’s what happened this time as well. Over the last couple of weeks, discussions about the UK’s future in the EU have dominated the news again. People have started thinking about their own view, and they’ve responded to YouGov with a more considered opinion, which has taken some people away from the ‘out’ camp.

So we have a plausible explanation – but it’s not the only possible answer.

Option 2: bad polling

Some polling is designed to find out what people would do if they’re exposed to certain information or arguments. If Tesco promised to make its beefburgers with only British ingredients, would you be more likely to shop there? If you’re told that 60% of people affected by the benefit cap are in work, would you be more likely to oppose it?

But other polling is supposed to be a pure measure of what people currently think. Questions like voting intent and the EU referendum should be in this category.

So for the EU referendum question to show accurately what people think, respondents shouldn’t be shown anything that might influence their response. In an ideal world, they’d only be asked about the EU, and then the poll would finish. But that would be expensive, so we have to accept that the EU question will go in a poll with other questions.

In that case, the other questions respondents see need to be consistent between polls. So if respondents are being influenced by the other questions, at least it’s happening in a comparable way.

But that’s not how YouGov have done it.

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I’ll begin with two questions:

What proportion of Americans say there is solid evidence that the earth is warming?

Is it: a) one quarter; b) one third; c) a half; or d) two thirds.

What has happened to that figure over the last four years?

Has it: a) fallen every year; b) stayed about the same; c) risen every year.

Judging by most conversations I have and the coverage of public views about climate change, most people would guess the answer is low and falling.

But here’s the answer, taken from the Pew Research Center’s annual polls: two thirds and rising.

Agreement in the US that the earth is warming is now higher than it’s been at any time since 2008. The research was conducted before Hurricane Sandy, so is probably higher now.

Sure, still only about half say it’s because of human activities – though that has also increased by a quarter over the last three years.

The debate about public views of climate change has changed in the US over the last few months. A number of polls in the autumn showed that the public is becoming more worried – and this was covered in the media.

But the UK lags behind. This week’s Observer included a powerful editorial, restating the evidence about current and future impacts of climate change. But it spoiled it with the line: “climate change denial is becoming entrenched in the UK, or … our media have become complacent about the issue, or both.”

Everyone I speak to about climate change seems to think this. But, purely in terms of public opinion about climate change, I can’t find any evidence to support it.

In fact, as I showed last year, concern about climate change in the UK is certainly not falling, and is probably increasing.

The polling is less extensive than it is in America, but I don’t know of a single poll that shows that the UK public are currently becoming more sceptical about climate change. The general pattern is instead that there was a one-off increase in doubts around late ’09 , which has been followed by a recovery over the years since then.

This set of YouGov polls is fairly typical:

Again, lots of people still express doubts about climate change*. But the trend is of scepticism falling, not of it increasing.

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