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Yale Climate Change Poll

posted by cmn32480 on Thursday April 23 2015, @11:51AM   Printer-friendly
from the you're-getting-warmer dept.

fleg writes:

An interesting poll on climate change from Yale University has been released. This poll, based on data collected in the USA, shows a number of things, perhaps the most interesting being that people who believe in climate change themselves is 63%, whilst those who believe there is scientific consensus on it is 41%.

Data shows responses to a number of climate related questions at the national, state, congressional district and county level.

 
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  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday April 24 2015, @02:03PM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday April 24 2015, @02:03PM (#174655) Journal
    Well, let's try to get in the headspace of a poll subject. First, by asking them the relatively neutral question of what they "believe", you aren't inducing most sorts of biasing thought (such as defensiveness) or encouraging them to lie. Even the ignorant denialists will tell you what they believe most of the time. Second, nobody self-diagnoses ignorance or denial very well in the brief time span of a poll and there is the well known effect that most people exaggerate the extent of their knowledge.

    Third, you don't ask leading or loaded questions because then you don't actually get information about the person.

    "Do you accept the conclusion by the professional climate science community that..."

    could be replaced with

    "Do you accept the conclusion by the professional climate shill community that..."

    You will get substantially different answer distributions when you lead the question differently. Everyone wants to agree with professional scientists. Nobody wants to agree with professional shills. That's why leading questions are undesirable in polls.

    Moving on, the poll is time limited. It is rare that one gets the opportunity to ask hundreds of questions of people and fully scope out their beliefs, opinions, and knowledge base. And way too often, when one does have the opportunity, there are huge biases distorting the results of such polls just due to who has the opportunity to be in that sort of poll. So in general, the pollster can't just toss in questions willy nilly.