When the Numbers Lie: Despite What Pollsters Want You Think, Climate Change Remains an Important Issue for the Public

Mark Twain famously said that there are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics. He could just as easily have included polls. Advocates across the political spectrum habitually cite polls to "prove" that the public holds a certain view of a given issue, even when the truth is more complicated or even contradictory. This appears to be happening with the climate issue. As the Obama administration and Congressional leaders prepare to introduce new climate legislation, mainstream media have given fresh prominence to deniers' claims of fraud and rampant error on the part of climate scientists. Meanwhile, surveys by Gallup and other leading pollsters are being spun as evidence that the deniers are gaining ground among the public, which is supposedly divided over whether to take action against rising temperatures and the droughts, storms and sea-level rise they trigger. A closer look, however, suggests that public opinion has changed very little. What has changed is the message coming from the media, key parts of which have reverted to their longstanding posture of scientific illiteracy and de facto complicity with the deniers' disinformation campaign.

This abuse of polling data has a long pedigree. As a young reporter in the 1980s researching the book On Bended Knee, I watched the Reagan White House use polls to make fools of the mainstream media and the Democratic Party. Reagan's advisers were forever citing polls supposedly demonstrating that the Gipper was wildly popular and thus that anyone who criticized him was taking a political risk. The truth was rather less flattering. Yes, Reagan was personally popular--most Americans thought he was a nice guy--but that had been true of almost all presidents. Ask Americans about Reagan's policies, however, and many were indeed unhappy with his trickle-down economics and bellicose foreign policy. Nevertheless, most news organizations and Congressional Democrats swallowed the White House spin and pulled their punches. As a result, Reagan escaped sharp and sustained criticism from the opposition party and the press for most of his presidency.

 

Today, a similar gullibility and misreading of polls is playing into the hands of climate change deniers. The campaign to deny the science behind man-made climate change, which seemed to be losing steam a year ago, has resurged in recent months, thanks to high-profile media coverage of stolen e-mails from a British climate unit and of trivial errors in the Fourth Assessment Report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. And Fox News and the Wall Street Journal editorial page are no longer the only major outlets trumpeting such charges. The New York Times, whose veteran climate reporter, Andrew Revkin, retired in December, has subsequently run two front-page stories suggesting that the science behind climate change may not be settled after all. The Times's February 9 article "U.N. Climate Panel and Its Chief Face a Siege on Their Credibility" quoted not a single mainstream climate scientist in support of its headline, noted Joseph Romm of the Center for American Progress, whose new book, Straight Up, blasts the media and deniers alike for misrepresenting climate science. Robert Brulle, a communications expert at Drexel University, accused the Times of becoming "an echo-chamber for the climate disinformation movement." The deniers' agenda has been further advanced by unquestioning coverage of polls by Gallup, the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, and other survey groups that claim to demonstrate growing public skepticism about climate change. Gallup's poll, released on March 11 and publicized internationally by Reuters, said that 48 percent of Americans now regard fears of climate change as "generally exaggerated."