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