Possum does a nice analysis looking at the desire to ‘do something’ about climate change and support for the CPRS. He runs a series of regressions that tend to show a one to one relationship between support for the CPRS and the need to do something now. His sample sizes look a little small – but the relationship looks to be quite robust no matter how he slices and dices the problem. (For those who understand regression analysis, he is suggesting that the coefficient on the x variable in his analysis is not statistically significantly different from one. He doesn’t report standard errors but I’m happy to believe him. In a later analysis he finds it greater than one).
Long story short.
In a political nutshell – Labor is losing the ground war on generic global warming opinion in this country.
This has some pretty serious implications.
For a government to ever successfully act on carbon emissions, will require them to successfully counteract the denialists. This is something that the Rudd government has so far refused to do – no doubt, at least in part, because of the softness in the ALP vote they are picking up in both the 30-49 yr male demographic (primarily, but not isolated to non-capital cities) and their recent inroads into the over 50’s. Both of those cohorts are more likely to be climate change sceptics than any other.
But if a government, this government specifically, ever wishes to build a solid majority of democratic opinion behind any carbon abatement policy, they cannot afford to vacate the field of global warming public opinion like they have – we’ve seen how the dynamics of that plays out right here in this post.
They need to carry large majorities of people with them that believe global warming is a phenomenon that requires action. Support for carbon abatement policy, even a program as second rate as the proposed CPRS, is reliant upon the proportion of the population that accepts the weight of climate science evidence – even if vicariously.
The Coalition are getting slightly disproportionate political returns on their encouragement of scepticism – getting an increase of more than 1% disapproving of the CPRS for every 1% of the population they can convince on the political backchannels to become a climate change sceptic. A wink here to Bolt, a nudge there to Jones, a deliberate public outburst from a Coalition denialist every now and then (or in Barnyards case, 18 hours a day) is paying dividends,
As long as the government continues to allow this to go unchallenged, as long as they continue to vacate the field of the generic global warming debate, they will continue to find themselves on the wrong end of the change in public opinion metrics – making carbon abatement policy an increasingly dangerous political and electoral event.
The battle for climate change policy will not be won or lost on the public battlefield of the detail of carbon abatement policy, it will be won or lost on the size of the majority that believe in the weight of evidence of climate science. It will be won or lost on the numbers of people that the government can convince to believe in the data.
If you get one, the other follows like a loyal dog.
Well, okay that is a long story too. I agree that the government will need to get a majority to support its policy. In some sense, of course, that is always true. I also think there does need to be another debate; if we really believe AGW is a problem and it can be fixed by policy intervention, then what sort of policy is required? We have already seen that Ross Garnaut is abandoning the ETS that he championed and now supports some sort of tax.
(HT: Offsetting Behaviour)
Update: John Carroll has an op-ed in The Age today talking about the recent Climate debate and the politics of that debate.
The claims made about the science have been rash, asserting dogmatic certainty about human-induced warming when the reality is that the overall picture is quite unclear. This has now backfired, with the IPCC admitting mistakes in its 2007 report, and the East Anglia Climatic Research Unit, which the IPCC has drawn heavily upon, shown to have been, at the least, devious in the results it has made public.
There may be some link between the rashness of the global warming campaign and the haplessness of the politics that has followed. The best current bet is that, after Copenhagen, emission controls is dead as a serious international issue. And further, only some environmental disaster that can be convincingly linked to climate change will rekindle it. The ”sceptics” have won the politics.
He is probably right, but I would hope that sensible level-headed individuals would continue to research the AGW-hypothesis and follow more professional standards of behaviour. Afterall even if we don’t believe the AGW hypothesis, humans are still having some impact on the environment and understanding that impact is still an important issue.
Carroll makes an important point
Of course, the objective case for global warming is separate from the manner in which some of its proponents have publicised it. And, it should be judged on its own merits. Nevertheless, I must confess to being wary of causes that attract pseudo-religious enthusiasm and intellectual fanaticism.
This is a point that the AGW lobby have yet to understand.
Update II: Britian’s chief scientist is also backpeddling.
Professor Beddington said that climate scientists should be less hostile to sceptics who questioned man-made global warming. He condemned scientists who refused to publish the data underpinning their reports.
He said that public confidence in climate science would be improved if there were more openness about its uncertainties, even if that meant admitting that sceptics had been right on some hotly disputed issues.
Public confidence has taken a pounding; The Australian is running a poll on this.
This is the bit that everyone should note (emphasis added).
Professor Beddington said that particular caution was needed when communicating predictions about climate change made with the help of computer models. “It’s unchallengeable that CO2 traps heat and warms the Earth and that burning fossil fuels shoves billions of tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere. But where you can get challenges is on the speed of change.
“When you get into large-scale climate modelling there are quite substantial uncertainties. On the rate of change and the local effects, there are uncertainties both in terms of empirical evidence and the climate models themselves.”
English translation: the science is not settled.
