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Saturday, 27 February 2010 11:52 |
by Graham Young
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Despite concern about global warming being still relatively well-spread we also found that respondents were not generally prepared to pay more than $10 per month extra on their electricity bill to fight it. There is also some relationship between views on global warming and voting intention.
We asked whether respondents believed that CO2 was making the earth warmer - effectively was it a greenhouse gas.
There was a statistically significant increase in those who thought it was, but no change in those who thought it wasn't - the balance have gone to the neutral spot. (These figures have been derived from a sample that was adjusted to reflect voting intentions as represented in the most recent Newspoll results so should be more representative of the general public than an unfiltered selection from our sample).
We then asked them whether they thought man was substantially responsible for an increase in global temperature.
Again, the change in support is due to some people beginning to doubt global warming is manmade, but not changing their mind to disbelieve the proposition.
We then asked whether they thought there was an unacceptable risk that global warming would be catastrophic.
In this case there was movement across from one side of the argument to the other. Views on this issue appear to align fairly closely to voting intention. The same pattern is evident in the other questions.
Finally we asked about support for the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme.
Compared in the moves in the other figures this is a dramatic collapse in support for the CPRS.
However, a bare majority still believes that Australia should move on global warming, even if the rest of the world is not ready to move.
But perhaps this should not be at any cost. The following table shows how much extra respondents would pay on their monthly electricity bill to fight climate change.
59% would pay no more than $10 additional per week.
This was highly correlated with voting intention.
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