Global Warming

     Assessing and understanding the beliefs, attitudes, values, or opinions of the people is a complex phenomenon that has engaged political and social thinkers for centuries. The search for better theories and methods will no doubt continue for years to come. The concern underlying this investigation of public opinion on the environment and global warming traces its heritage in many ways to the France of 1744, when Rousseau apparently first used the phrase l'opinion publique to combine the notions of public and opinion in a political rather than social phenomenon (Price, 1992, p. 8). Bien public became "the common will" in America, and helped start and perpetuate a revolution in political thought and government design. Since that time, a search for the will of the people became an underlying normative assumption first for political journalism, and later public opinion research in the social sciences. At some point in time, the central questions became:

Q1. Is it possible to accurately measure public opinion?

Q2. If so, what is the best way to go about it?

Measuring Public Opinion

     That question is still being asked today, with adherents of competing methodologies. An additional intellectual rift, which gapes open even today, first split early Enlightenment thinkers. Historians have suggested that many early intellectuals were ambivalent about individualism and the value of open debate and controversy in politics. Even Rousseau believed people gave up some individual rights in the interest of the common welfare. According to Price:

The problem of how to divine public opinion out of a conflicting mass of individual opinions was a central dilemma of liberal political philosophy. The autonomy of public opinion borne of reason was one solution (p. 11).

     But it was not the only solution. Early supporters of liberal democracy saw competent public opinion as the middle class voice, a safeguard against state tyranny, and as an agent of progress. Conservatives, on the other hand, saw public enlightenment and participation in politics as "potentially dangerous, shallow, and transitory." The prevailing view was that the public was "largely misinformed; and in need of practical limitations as a political force" (Price, 1992, p. 15).

     The debate surrounding the role of the press in this process erupted in the 1920s between Walter Lippmann and John Dewey, with Dewey and Lippmann both advocating the press as a bridge to an informed citizenry (Lippmann, 1922; Dewey, 1927). Lippmann changed his mind between 1922 and 1925, however, and eventually called the task impossible (Lippmann, 1925).

     Setting aside these controversies for now, the three most visible ways of assessing public opinion will be discussed. They are voting patterns, measuring media content, and obtaining public opinion from survey research.

     Voting

     Of all the ways of measuring it, according to Kennamer, "Voting is the most visible and concrete sign of public opinion" (1994, p. 2). And according to Price, "No doubt the act of voting is a clear, behavioral expression of opinion . . . " (1992, p. 38). The problems acknowledged by both authors are that voters often dutifully go the polls with only a hazy notion of issues and policy options at stake, and low voter turnout is viewed as a problem in some countries, most notably the United States.

     It is my contention, however, that public policy should be decided by the attentive public, who are more likely to be members of the voting public. In spite of the inherent difficulties and inequities underlying this position (e.g. powerful economic interests exert greater influence on politics) it still makes more sense to base political decisions on informed activism rather than ignorant plebiscite, even if technology is closer than ever to providing a mechanism for direct democracy with the Internet and electronic mail, at least for now. It is also assumed here that a more informed and active public will result in a more egalitarian society, more free of social problems, including racism and environmental degradation.

The goal should be to expand the range of the attentive and active publics with education and informed, investigative journalism.

     In any case, voting is probably not the most reliable measure of public opinion in the United States, primarily due to low levels of voter knowledge and turnout. And after all, we will most likely never have the opportunity to vote directly on what the U.S. global warming policies should be. Yet we can vote for or against candidates who favor or oppose environmentally responsible positions, and there is some evidence that environmentalists are becoming major players in American and global politics. According to Ingram, Colnic, and Mann (1995):

Since the 1960s environmental interest groups have become permanent features in the landscape of American politics . . . major forces in the political system, capable of altering the political agenda and winning significant victories against the usually dominant industrial and commercial interests of the United States (p. 115).

     Media Content

     Politicians, business leaders, and activists have long monitored media content as a measure of public opinion. Press clipping services and staff-prepared daily press briefings are still part of the ongoing routine of those in power. In the digital age approaching, new technologies using the Internet and so-called "push" techniques are on the cutting edge of this method. [ 1 ] Kennamer and others refer to this media monitoring as a tool used by public officials "as a surrogate for public opinion" (1994, p. 11). The underlying assumption here is that "public information is the currency on which democracy operates" (p. 35). Yet this process is often crude and riddled with bias.

     Historians might find a closer match between newspaper content and public opinion in the early days of American journalism, when the partisan press was the norm. Content might be a more accurate measure in other countries where newspapers still cater to specialized political audiences. Yet an unresolved contradiction resides in Kennamer's analysis. He says on one hand that a "responsibility to report on public opinion has not been incorporated into journalism's institutionalized values," and further that different expectations underlie public opinion theory and the reason the press reports on public opinion. Yet he goes onto cite Robinson, who in 1932 may have been more right about journalism socialization and local reporting when he observed:

If anyone is able to gauge . . . sentiment accurately, it should be the skilled newspaperman. He is a trained observer of public opinion; he is close to the politicians who are endeavoring to manipulate public beliefs; he has the opportunity to gather information from all quarters; and, in addition, he has the newspaperman's intuition, which comes through long association with political affairs (Robinson, 1932, p. 14).

     In recent years, however, researchers have begun to perfect content analysis techniques, an unobtrusive way to measure media content. Quantitative methods are employed, usually traditional hand-coding techniques, and more recently computerized content analysis (for example, see Riechert, 1996; or Wilson and Crandon, 1998). More interpretive, qualitative methods may also provide insight into "how the media frame the terms of public debate" (Price, 1992, p. 87).

     While content analysis can be a highly reliable and valid way to measure what and how issues are covered and framed in the media, it does not appear to be an accurate way to gauge public opinion. As far back in history as the 1930s, Allport warned about the danger of mistaking opinions in the press for public opinion (Allport, 1937). He termed this the "journalistic fallacy," although he acknowledged a potentially self-reinforcing mechanism, what we might today refer to as "agenda setting" (McCombs, et al., 1997).

     Survey Research

     In the last half of the twentieth century, public opinion survey techniques have proven quite useful and accurate at taking the public pulse on a host of issues, most notably elections. "Indeed," according to Price, "the ability of opinion polls to predict election results has for a long time been taken as an indication of their general validity" (1992, p. 37). While polls are only snapshots of the mass public mood at a given point in time, they aid researchers in analyzing trends, journalists in reporting on public sentiment, and government officials in the formation of public policy. The results are often criticized, however, and sometimes for good reason.

     Academic critiques of media polling focus on what is reported or not, most notably question wording and order, the margin of sampling error, sample size, sponsor, population studied, and method of interviewing. In response to these criticisms, and events in the 1970s, survey research firms adopted higher standards, culminating in the American Association for Public Opinion Research Standards of Minimal Disclosure adopted in 1986.

     The journalistic critique goes back to an anti-intellectual strain of thought rooted in the street journalism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the education of journalists in the humanities rather than science or math, and the traditional adversarial relationship with marketers and politicians. Journalists are by nature and training pragmatists, relying on hard work, intuition, and common sense to find out the real story. Pollsters in the newsroom in a sense carried the divide between green eye-shades and chi-squares from the halls of academe to the newsroom. And pencil pusher is the derogatory name reserved for marketers and management, who know how to make money, but not necessarily the best way to allocate resources to collect and disseminate the news.

     When polls become news, according to Kennamer, they interfere with "good journalism and . . . good polling" (1994, p. 142). They reduce complex issues to a false dichotomy between black and white, favor/oppose alternatives; they foster pack journalism; and lead to so-called horse race coverage, often ignoring important issues. Rather than a horse race, which is extremely short in duration, American political reporting might more accurately be compared to a different sport.

     Onc of the central charges of public opinion research, according to Price, "is finding out which analogies come closest to describing how we typically conduct our public affairs" (1996, p. 91). Yet Fischer concedes that analogies are not precise explanations, at least for epistemological puritans (1970).

They are devices for discovering explanations . . . . Analogical inference plays an . . . indespensable part in the mysterious process of intellectual creativity (p. 243) . . . equally useful and ornamental in the articulation of ideas . . . a vehicle for the transference of thought from one mind to another . . . versatile and effective pedagogical tools" (p. 244).

     Political reporting as sports writing provides such an analogy. Say baseball instead of a horse race, and you get the picture. We are good at reporting who is ahead, who is behind, and based on the averages, who is likely to win the World Series (substitute election). We are often not as good at reporting what it all means and why, providing the citizens with the background, mobilizing information or cues they need to successfully participate. If we had more political coverage like Ken Burns' PBS series on baseball, our public affairs reportage would better serve the interest of citizens, and our system of government would most likely benefit. And who knows, people might actually tune in.

     Other critics even say traditional news values ignore "the real state of public opinion" in favor of the "merely newsworthy" (1994, p. 143). Seeking out prominent people leads to questions about public figures rather than issues, the argument goes, while the timely nature of news creates a structural ignorance of long-term trends.

     Setting those criticisms aside for now, our purposes are best served by surveys, since they are by far the most valid and reliable way to measure public opinion from large populations, especially nationally or globally. So the questions become:

Q3. What do we know from surveys about public attitudes on the environment generally?

Q4. What do we know from surveys about public attitudes on global warming specifically?

Public Concern for the Environment

     Public concern for the environment in the United States became a major issue in the 1960s and early 1970s, some say as a partial result of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. Gallup was the first national survey research organization to pick up significant numbers on concern for the natural environment (Gallup, 1970). Four percent of the American public sampled by Gallup named the environment as the number one problem facing the country on an open ended question. The number rose to 5 percent in 1972. Extrapolating to the entire population, this represents about 2 million people who said the environment represented more of a problem than the Vietnam war, the economy, education, crime, or anything else at the time. Knowing what we know today about the agenda-setting role of the mass media, and how to analyze media coverage, this number is not surprising (McCombs and Shaw, 1972, 1992). The Clean Air Act passed Congress in 1970 at the behest of Republican President Richard Nixon, in a rare bipartisan effort. It was one of the big media stories of the year, along with the Vietnam War. And according to Sandman, Sachsman, and Greenberg (1992), growing awareness of environmental problems can be traced back to the Santa Barbara oil spill of the late 1960s.

     After an extensive review of the sparse public opinion data during the period, it becomes clear that public concern for the environment escalated in the late 1960s and early 1970s, yet was not the top concern for public participation. Dunlap concluded:

From a social movements perspective, it appears that a majority of the public was sympathetic to the environmentalists' goal of protecting the environment and a sizable minority was explicitly attentive to environmental issues (Dunlap, et al., 1995, p. 77).

     As the energy crisis grabbed the nation's attention in 1974, however, the shortage of oil and the price of gas became the issue, and the environment plummeted from the polls. It did not make it's way back again until the late 1980s. As measured by the most important problem question, public concern for the environment peaked at 8 percent in 1990 around the twentieth anniversary of Earth Day. With the U.S. population at 260 million, this represents almost 25 million people, plus or minus 3 percent. The number dropped to 3 percent in 1992, 2 percent in 1994, then leveled out at 3 percent again in 1996 (Wilson, 1997).

Public Concern on Global Warming

     The most cited poll in the media and on the Internet this year, and the most recent, shows that a large majority of Americans are willing to pay more to address global warming (Pew, Nov. 21, 1997). Nearly three of every four Americans said they would pay a nickel a gallon more for gasoline, while 60 percent said they would pay a full 25 cents more. Yet most view global warming as less of an environmental threat than toxic waste or pollution of the air and waterways, according to a survey of 1,200 American adults by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. The telephone survey was conducted in mid-November and reported on the eve of climate negotiations with 160 other countries in Kyoto, Japan.

     The purpose of the summit was to work out binding reductions of greenhouse gases by industrial nations, although some nations opposed the treaty. For it to take effect in the United States, it has to be approved by the U.S. Senate, now under the control of a Republican majority. While the proposals leading up to the conference were to limit mandatory emission cuts to industrial countries--and not developing nations such as China--the Pew survey showed that Americans were adamant that all nations participate. Seven of every 10 respondents said rich and poor countries alike should share equally in addressing the threat of climate change, even though industrial nations such as the United States have been the major contributors of greenhouse gases, mainly carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels.

     The Clinton administration proposed that industrial countries stem the continued growth of greenhouse gases to 1990 levels by the 2008-2012 period. The Pew survey found that most people do not consider the climate debate urgent and rank the threat of global warming well behind other environmental concerns such as pollution of lakes and rivers (61 %), cleanup of toxic wastes (59 %), dirty air (47 %) and loss of natural wildlife habitat (46 %). Only 25 percent in the 1997 survey said they worry "a great deal" about global warming or the greenhouse effect, down from 30 percent in a 1990 Gallup survey (Gallup and Newport, 1990). [ 2 ]

     In a survey of college undergraduate students, Bord, Fisher, and O'Conner (1997) found that 44 percent said global warming was "already happening," 29 percent said "it will probably happen in the next 50 years," 10 percent selected "it might not be happening now but is sure to happen within the next 50 years." Another 15 percent said "it is doubtful," while only 2 percent chose the option " it definitely will not happen." Another way of looking at it is that 83 percent believe global warming is happening or will happen unless we take action, while only 17 percent doubt it.

     The Pew survey, the Gallup poll, and the student survey appear to meet the Standards of Minimal Disclosure set forth by the American Association for Public Opinion Research. Other surveys, sponsored by environmental groups and others, are more suspect.

     Environmental Group Surveys

     One survey cited often on the Web is the Mellman Poll, released by the World Wildlife Organization, which showed "overwhelming public support for international efforts to halt global warming," according to the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC, 1997). The headline: "Americans Expect Politicians, Business and Technology to Solve Threat." Some of the AAPOR standards of minimal disclosure are reported here, although the sponsor of the poll and the group reporting it call the results into question. The NRDC says:

The poll indicates that a large majority of American citizens agree that government officials including, the president, should address the issue (global warming) immediately. The poll also found that most Americans were willing to pay slightly more tax money in exchange for stronger environmental action. The survey of 800 registered voters from across the country was conducted in August. It revealed that most Americans, including two-thirds of self-professed "conservative" Republicans, want political leaders such as President Clinton to address this issue immediately by signing an international agreement to cut carbon dioxide emissions. Furthermore, they believe that corporate America already has the technological know-how to combat global warming, and most are willing to pay moderately higher prices for clean energy alternatives (emphasis added).

     Considering the findings on how conservatives respond, it would be interesting to see how the questions were worded, and how the political affiliation was compared statistically. Reporting the results of another environmental group sponsored survey, the NRDC says: "America Speaks out on Energy: A Survey of 1996 Post-Election Views." Here again the wording is telling.

This analysis of a national public opinion survey released by the Sustainable Energy Coalition found broad, consistent and bi-partisan support for federal funding, tax incentives and appliance efficiency standards to promote renewable energy and energy efficient technology programs. The survey also found that little support exists for fossil fuels, such as coal and oil, or for nuclear power technologies. According to the analysis, a majority of respondents also support mandating renewable energy sources and efficiency efforts.

     "No support" for gas guzzling cars? Perhaps automobile buying habits and driving trends would be a better measure of American public opinion on this issue.

     Surveys of Scientists

     While an entirely credible survey of scientists has not yet been identified, the American Scientist published an interesting small survey in 1994 (Nordhous). A Yale economics professor surveyed 22 scientists considered to be experts on global warming, economics, and statistics. The arbitrary sample consisted of 10 economists, four "other social scientists," and five "natural scientists and engineers" (p. 46).

     While the findings cannot be generalized due to the nature of the sample, the qualitative results produced findings worth pondering. Economists by and large show little concern for long-term economic damage from global warming, primarily due to an optimistic view that humans will be able to adapt and develop technologies to cope with the climatic problems and changes. Natural scientists dispay a much more pessimistic view of our ability to adapt to potentially irreversable impacts on natural ecosystems, estimating the economic impacts 20-30 times worse than economists.

     One economist said a 3-degree warming by 2090 would be "small potatoes" (p. 48). Another said "I don't care about ants except for drugs" (p. 50). On the other hand, a natural scientist said a 20-degree warming would result in a "nearly ice-free world . . . the biosphere would be radically changed, and I suspect there would be severe economic effects" (p. 49). Another said a 6-degree increase in a century "could be catostrophic" (p. 49). Among the concerns? The spread of tropical diseases, loss of biodiversity, storm systems moving further north on the globe, and difficulty for developing nations to cope with the changes. The author's conclusion is that we don't know what the long-term effects will be on the biogeochemical system or on the economy, and that only the roll of dice called history will show who will win the race "between our tendency to quarrel and pollute and our power to reason and compute" (p. 51).

     In the next section, the diversity and dynamics of public opinion on global warming will be explicated in some depth.

---

Copyright © Glynn R. Wilson, 1998.
All rights reserved.