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posted by janrinok on Tuesday April 07 2015, @05:23AM   Printer-friendly

Mary-Ann Muffoletto over at phys.org reports that researchers from Utah State and Yale Universities have developed a statistical model which puports to accurately estimate public opinion about climate change at the national, state and local levels, using documented research methods.

From the phys.org article:

Americans waste little time or ink debating global warming, but what do they really think about it in Peoria? Or Los Angeles? Or any other town, big or small, across the 50 states?

"My colleagues and I wanted to find out how people feel at the local level," says Peter Howe, assistant professor of human-environment geography in Utah State University's Department of Environment and Society and the USU Ecology Center. With Yale University researchers Matto Mildenberger, Jennifer Marlon and Anthony Leiserowitz, Howe describes a new statistical model that accurately estimates public climate change opinion in the April 6, 2015 issue of Nature Climate Change. "The idea was to develop a tool to map public opinion to get a sense of geographic variation across the country," says Howe, lead author on the paper. "Decisions about how to respond to issues such as climate change can happen at the state and local level as well as the national level, so we wanted to find out what people think about the issue at these levels."

The new model estimates opinion and support in all 50 states, 435 congressional districts and more than 3,000 counties across the nation. It's based on survey data collected from more than 12,000 people across the nation.

...

State and local surveys are costly and time-intensive, the researchers say, and most public polling is only done at the national level. The new model, for the first time, reveals the full geographic diversity of American public opinion. "A project like this has never been done at this scale before," Howe says. "It allows us to visualize the data and look for patterns." The model's results enabled the researchers to construct the interactive, online tool "Yale Climate Opinion Maps" at http://environment.yale.edu/poe/v2014/ , which allows users to explore public opinion in geographic detail.

 
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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by Snotnose on Tuesday April 07 2015, @06:01AM

    by Snotnose (1623) on Tuesday April 07 2015, @06:01AM (#167331)

    Lived here since the 60s. Went through the "if it's brown flush it down, if it's yellow let it mellow" crap. (If it's yellow flush it down, else cleaning your toilet is much harder) Installed low flush toilets, low flow shower heads 30 years ago. Ripped out my backyard and paved it 20 years ago, and added drip irrigation (farking pain in the ass, you have to clean those damned nozzles every spring).

    Meanwhile, I see housing developments sprouting like mushrooms everywhere I look.

    Seems us little people use some 20% of the water in Ca, farmers get 80%.

    So, lets figure it out. My class of peeps is using 20% of the water. My class of peeps has done everything we can, 20 years ago. My class of peeps has seen the number of new housing developments triple since the 70s.

    Do I conserve water? Fuck no, I use what I need and the hell with the drought.

    --
    Why shouldn't we judge a book by it's cover? It's got the author, title, and a summary of what the book's about.
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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by anubi on Tuesday April 07 2015, @06:43AM

    by anubi (2828) on Tuesday April 07 2015, @06:43AM (#167341) Journal

    I have been lied to so many times by my own government I really have a hard time believing *anything* they say, albeit they did have me convinced hook, line, and sinker on the "energy crisis".

    I misinvested a lot of resources because I took the words of the President of the United States of America seriously.

    Now they are hocking up yet another crisis.

    Are they telling the truth this time? Or is this another imaginary wolf to get us to misinvest our resources?

    Its hard to trust some folks, and one who has deliberately misinformed me before is even harder to trust.

    --
    "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
    • (Score: 4, Informative) by aristarchus on Tuesday April 07 2015, @06:56AM

      by aristarchus (2645) on Tuesday April 07 2015, @06:56AM (#167344) Journal

      I misinvested a lot of resources because I took the words of the President of the United States of America seriously.

      See, that's what happens when you trust a hollywood actor! Many also perished in the great stagflation of the Reagan years. (pro market tip: never trust Republicans. Seriously!)

      • (Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday April 07 2015, @02:12PM

        by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday April 07 2015, @02:12PM (#167448) Journal

        Many also perished in the great stagflation of the Reagan years.

        You mean the Nixon years. Reagan's era had times of high unemployment (in 1981), but these were coupled with usual low inflation.

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by frojack on Tuesday April 07 2015, @07:04AM

      by frojack (1554) on Tuesday April 07 2015, @07:04AM (#167346) Journal

      And these guys re-invented structured sampling.

      Now they are trying to tell us they know what we think after sampling 12000 self selected individuals. Meanwhile 80% of the people they contacted wouldn't give the the time of day.

      --
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    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by VortexCortex on Tuesday April 07 2015, @10:35AM

      by VortexCortex (4067) on Tuesday April 07 2015, @10:35AM (#167384)

      Do you remember the Global Cooling crisis?

      Are we not in an ice age now?

      Maybe I should go outside some time and see for myself... if not for that self-radicalising ISIS Ebola, eh?

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 07 2015, @03:25PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 07 2015, @03:25PM (#167476)

        An "ice age" only lasts until all the glaciers melt. The two phases of ice ages are glaciation and interglacial. We're in an inter-glacial period now. When people hear the word "ice age" however they think of "glaciation".

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 08 2015, @03:22AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 08 2015, @03:22AM (#167713)

        What global cooling crisis? Are you referring to a fucking Newsweek article? (If you don't even know what article I'm talking about, then even more pathetic, you're just parroting the '"they" said at some point in history that there was going to be global cooling' BS and you don't even know where that comes from nor its context) Is that the basis for those iron-clad insightful bits of info you keep in that melon of yours? AND, do you recall the phase-out of CFCs, you know, those particular type of aerosols that have long residence times in the atmosphere, the kind of particles that drive the cooling part of the energy balance on the planet but also fuck up the ozone layer (the halon component of the aerosols)? Remember the Clean Air Act and the fucking Montreal Protocol? They removed a shit ton of aerosols from the atmosphere and guess what happened? Their cooling effects are greatly subdued. That is what fucking science is all about: observation, prediction, make a change, and other shit happens.

        What really is amazing is that you somehow draw from this that "they" don't know what they're talking about. Not the fact that your grasping of basic facts seem to come from cereal boxes and cable news pundits.

  • (Score: 3, Informative) by fliptop on Tuesday April 07 2015, @01:45PM

    by fliptop (1666) on Tuesday April 07 2015, @01:45PM (#167431) Journal

    Seems us little people use some 20% of the water in Ca, farmers get 80%.

    I know your comment was moderated OT, but during the population explosion you referred to, a reservoir or water conveyance system has not been built during the past 20-some years. A very large percentage of rainwater that falls in CA washes out to sea [nbcnews.com].

    Just yesterday Carly Fiorina did a radio interview where she outlined the CA water crisis [washingtontimes.com] quite well.

    --
    Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.