There is a long-standing and extensive literature that searches for ‘social predictors’ of public attitudes on climate change: the social or demographic factors – such as political attitude, age, education or relative prosperity, among many other candidates – that can explain how people view the issue. As predictive power is sought at national as well as individual level, further candidates might include, for example, the relative civil liberties of a nation or its exposure to climate impacts.

The Holy Grail of this field is a single variable that is potent enough to explain, in broad terms, public attitudes on climate change, for instance whether it is man-made, whether they’ll be harmed by it, or what priority they might give to fighting it (relative to other issues or threats); in other words, a variable that can predict a large part of the level of such attitudes in a population; if not at the dizzy heights of 50%, then maybe 30%, say, where this is at least the largest single factor among (perhaps many) others. The general idea behind this search, sometimes made explicit, is that knowledge of the drivers of attitudes would enable publics to be nudged in the ‘right’ direction, which of course is the direction of supporting Net Zero policies.

However, outside the USA[1] the Holy Grail has slipped further and further away. A dozen years or more back, the search still featured attempts to find a single powerful predictor. But as the years passed without success, efforts moved to multivariate analysis; it was hoped that groups of say three or four variables might yield greater predictive power when considered together. Unfortunately, these efforts did not deliver dramatic improvements, and introduced disagreements about which groupings were best. So, more and more variables were then pulled into the search, in a seemingly desperate attempt to find the missing magic that would make prediction possible. This required more complex models and increasingly sophisticated statistics.

As a result, the field now features webs of related variables, some of which themselves are high-level concepts such as ‘New ecological paradigm’, or ‘Class’ (engaged, pessimistic, indifferent, doubtful). A higher-level concept at the national level is for example ‘attitudes to environmental care’. Ridiculous variables have been dragged in too, such as the number of climate scientists residing in each nation!

Figure 1 is representative of the current predictor literature. It depicts fiendish complexity!

Predicting public attitudes on climate change in the current literature
Figure 1: Public attitudes on climate change: a typical model from the literature (Source: Ruiz et al.)

The top half of Figure 2 shows a range of typical predictor values from this literature; some are older, some newer, some from simpler models and some more complex ones, some concern individual attitudes while others are national in scope. However, ultimately, they all result from a chronic lack of underlying theory about the attitudes being examined. Only one paper exceeds the 30% level.[2]

Predicting public attitudes on climate change: predictive powers
Figure 2: Power of predictors in the literature (top) and using cultural causation (bottom)

This situation has now changed dramatically. As my book ‘The Grip of Culture’ sets out, there is an underlying predictor that can explain public attitudes on climate change. In other words, at the national level, we have found the Holy Grail: a single variable that predicts a high proportion of the public attitudes on climate change (33–87% depending on the attitude), and across a wide range of attitudes; it is national religiosity. Figure 3 represents the theory in the same manner as the example diagram from the literature, and the bottom half of Figure 2 shows the dramatically increased predictive power from this very straightforward model. Attitude data comes from many independent sources – mainstream pollsters such as YouGov, Ipsos, Pew and more, plus the UN and EU.

Predicting public attitudes on climate change using cultural causation
Figure 3: Public attitudes on climate change: the cultural causation model

The underlying theory is that overall attitudes are shaped by cultures and their interactions. There is a cultural entity, a secular religion of climate catastrophism, which dominates public attitudes (and policy too) across nations. It also interacts with the older culture of religion (any faith), which is why the predictor works.

While my book includes a list of technical reasons for why the Holy Grail predictor was missed, it can be summarised as being the result of entrenched bias in social science, which labours under a misapprehension that global climate catastrophe is an output of ‘hard science’, rather than recognising its true nature – an emotive cultural narrative that contradicts mainstream science. Of course, if you aren’t looking for a culture, you probably won’t find one!

Cultures can have very unintuitive effects; for instance many countries appear to be simultaneously very concerned about climate change and very keen that nothing should be done about it. Wanna know why? Read the book!

[1] One of the few things upon which I agree with the literature, is that the situation in the US is different, due to the very high degree of political polarisation there on climate change and many other issues. The theory of cultural causation still holds, but mapping this to the US is more complex. Chapter 12 in the book covers this (political stance is a great predictor, but more subtly 4 cultures are operating, of which one is still climate catastrophism).

[2] Lo and Chow’s result was due to a near miss of the correct theory, but unfortunately this wasn’t followed up. Another study (T1) exceeds 30% for some nations but not others.

48 Comments

  2. Andy,

    As an interested bystander regarding cultural issues, I am very happy to consider that climate catastrophism is a secular form of a new religion, if that isn’t an oxymoron. Certainly, when discussing it with friends who are catastrophists (and I’m pleased to say that we remain friends despite our differences on this and other topics) the response to my basing my scepticism on hard facts and statistics, is almost overwhelmingly emotional, and ignores the facts or statistics.

    However, it does occur to me that a significant factor (if not the Holy Grail) when searching for “a single variable that is potent enough to explain, in broad terms, public attitudes on climate change“, might it not be found in the extent to which the public in any given country is bombarded by climate change propaganda? And might a sub-variable be whether the person doing the bombarding is a trusted source of information?

    For instance, in the UK, increasingly nurseries, schools and universities are climate alarmism propaganda units, indoctrinating their charges. That has to have a significant impact, I would suggest. Also, the BBC barely shuts up about climate change. I increasingly find that when I switch on the radio (permanently tuned to BBC radio 4) there is an excellent chance that they (whichever programme is on at whatever time of day) will be talking about climate change (or a variation on the theme – e.g. net zero, heat pumps, electric vehicles, renewable energy). For all its faults, the BBC is, I would venture to suggest, still a trusted information source so far as a large proportion of the population is concerned.

    Do you think these factors are significant, and can they be substantial explainers of the UK’s apparent obsession with climate change?

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  3. Mark: ‘However, it does occur to me that a significant factor (if not the Holy Grail) when searching for “a single variable that is potent enough to explain, in broad terms, public attitudes on climate change“, might it not be found in the extent to which the public in any given country is bombarded by climate change propaganda? And might a sub-variable be whether the person doing the bombarding is a trusted source of information?’

    I would indeed expect this to be a significant variable that would move with public attitudes, albeit it is one that is far harder to measure on a national basis (as there are so many different channels and corresponding levels of trust), than is national religiosity, which is a very simple single metric that has very reliable data. And further, I would think that this media propaganda is in part causal; for sure it plays its part. However, it is in a sense not the *ultimate* cause, in that the phenomenon is emergent. The ultimate cause is the human tendency towards cultural belief, and the stronger this belief is within any nation, then the more it will have drilled into all that nation’s institutions, including schools, governmental orgs, businesses, and indeed the media too. So although more propaganda gives more cultural belief, more cultural belief also gives more propaganda; but propaganda comes in an almost infinite variety of forms and through many institutions, so it’s impossible to measure it in practice.

    The reason that religiosity works so well is that, across nations, the culture of climate catastrophism reacts with the older culture of religion (any faith), resulting in a very strong dual relationship (responses to unconstrained questions strongly correlate with national religiosity, and responses to reality-constrained questions strongly anti-correlate). So religiosity is acting like a lens, or a dipstick into the culture, that shows us the average of how far the cultural belief has penetrated, in all the ways that it does, within each national population.

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  4. Interesting concept, a single descriptor of a multi-dimensional phenomenon.
    IMO there should be a time-related coefficient connected to one or more of: attention span; boredom factor; instantaneous credibility index; recent experience; current credibility.
    For example, it occurs to me that since the covid over-reaction fiasco, public belief in “the Science” has drastically deteriorated.
    There is a great del of non-linearity involved.

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  5. Catweazle: “IMO there should be a time-related coefficient connected to one or more of: attention span; boredom factor; instantaneous credibility index; recent experience; current credibility.”

    There is indeed very considerable time-related change. My book covers this. The culture did not spring instantaneously into life, but emerged over decades. Although the social data is far sparser going back in time, the theory of cultural causation gives us some idea of what to expect compared to now, if we go back far enough say that the current relationship between religion and climate catastrophism wasn’t established, or at least wasn’t mature. I use data from a window between 2005 and 2009 for this, and it matches expectations (and is very different to the ‘modern’ data). The main ‘modern’ results are all post-2015, when I believe that relationship was mature, and I also split them between pre-covid (so 2015 to early 2020), and post-covid (mid-2020 to late 2022, which are the latest results in the book).

    All the main cultural patterns I’m looking for are present in the pre-covid data, which is extremely stable across many independent sources in this time period. But perhaps surprisingly, covid does not seem to have had a huge effect on these patterns, for the post covid data. They are essentially the same, although the average correlation values are somewhat weaker (yet still far more robust than the social predictors in the current literature). I suspect what happened is that at first, climate catastrophism suffered from the competitive threat of covid (which also, at first, didn’t have cultural entanglements), but well before the end of the post-covid data, climate catastrophism had pivoted to take advantage of the new landscape, in which those covid-related activities still taking place had also become very entangled with prior culture, especially in the US with Dem-Lib culture (which is also allied to catastrophism).

    Remember we are looking only at data for whole nations, so all the details of why things change over time that you mention, and indeed many more, are subsumed into a single time profile for the whole nation. So it’s a net result, which nevertheless behaves as one would expect if culture was the principle driver, whatever the thousands of processes within that profile actually are. I suspect that role of science in covid is one of the reasons why climate catastrophism is weathering the covid assault so well now (it can take advantage of ‘lockdown’ like features and generally timidity to authority and an established willingness to yield to cultural demands from elites), while the loss of trust in it that you mention is also enervating the innate (not rational) scepticism in mass publics, against catastrophism. In short, more polarisation. But the innate reaction against a culture is also in effect a cultural mechanism, and this is part and parcel of the patterns even from before covid.

    In summary, the Holy Grail predictor is outstanding in the 2015 to early 2020 period, utterly trashing the weak values for predictors in the literature (see the relative prediction strengths in Figure 20, all mine are from the pre-covid window). And only a little worse in the post-covid period (not shown), but still far out-stripping the literature at any date.

    A big problem with the literature seems indeed to have been that, because there is no strong underlying theory as to what drives attitudes (more a large collection of weak theories), then it also seems to have been assumed that papers written in 2009 or 2010, say, can still form a solid base which is used to help explain results from 2019, say, but without any assumption of major evolution between the two dates, because there isn’t a sufficiently strong theoretical base from which anyone has any idea what the evolution would be.

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  7. Reports I have seen from other countries indicate that public attitudes on social issues are often determined by their circumstances. Having a nuclear family, multiple children, living in suburbia, a mortgage and religion are generally predictors of their views being conservative (note the small “c”) So Religion would be just a subset not the determinant. And there is a compelling case that climate change is the new religion for the atheist, with its dogma, holy books, priests and heretics.
    Rather than a single predictor, the better variable is how firm is the support for climate change. I suspect it is very soft and squishy. Ask people how much a week they are personally prepared to pay to “remedy” climate change. Anything above nothing is generally in the minority from all the surveys I have seen. Tell the people how much tax money per person they are paying in subsidies for the unreliables and ask them if this is value for money.
    The adherents ‘”support” is only there because the people don’t know the cost.

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  8. Chris: “Reports I have seen from other countries indicate that public attitudes on social issues are often determined by their circumstances. Having a nuclear family, multiple children, living in suburbia, a mortgage and religion are generally predictors of their views being conservative (note the small “c”)”

    This is the data from 64 countries, from many independent sources as is publicly available from a range of mainstream pollsters (Gallup, Pew, YouGov etc) plus the EU and UN, which is also extremely stable across all the sources. Also, the results are at *national* level, whereas the factors you note are at *individual* level. Nevertheless, the typical range of predictor results from the huge number of studies over the last 15 years or so, at either individual or national level (there are some of both) in the current literature, are shown in the top half of Figure 2 above. These are all very weak, excepting Lo and Chow, which was a near miss of the correct theory but sadly was never followed up, and just overlaps the weakest prediction strength for the range of attitudes I predict with national religiosity. And the predictors in the literature do indeed include things like small ‘c’ conservatism, education level, whatever, and literally hundreds of other factors that the current literature thinks are important in order to predict attitudes to climate change. BUT… as shown by the bottom half of Figure 2, the prediction strength for national religiosity alone far exceeds that for any of those variables, whether they relate to individual or national levels. And as the post notes, in order to try and beef up the predictive power, the literature lately uses sophisticated models to group predictors in various ways, but this still doesn’t achieve anything like the results for national religiosity alone.

    “Rather than a single predictor, the better variable is how firm is the support for climate change. I suspect it is very soft and squishy. Ask people how much a week they are personally prepared to pay to “remedy” climate change. Anything above nothing is generally in the minority from all the surveys I have seen. Tell the people how much tax money per person they are paying in subsidies for the unreliables and ask them if this is value for money.”

    This is fully covered in the book, and indeed much of the data mentioned above is of this ‘reality-constrained’ kind. Not only is your point true, it turns out to be a fundamental principle that is dependent on the level of cultural belief in both climate catastrophism and religion (any faith), because these two cultures interact. In other words, the gap between virtue signalling attitudes and reality constrained attitudes, is different per nation, varies enormously but systemically across nations, and can be reasonably predicted by knowing national religiosity alone.

    “So Religion would be just a subset not the determinant. And there is a compelling case that climate change is the new religion for the atheist, with its dogma, holy books, priests and heretics.”

    See the book. The case for climate catastrophism being a cultural entity is more than just compelling, it is fully demonstrated by the data. And all the public attitudes across nations are shown to fundamentally arise from cultural causation, i.e. the level of belief in climate catastrophism and / or religion, although in the US these 2 cultures are joined by Rep/Con and Dem/Lib tribalism, which also matter.

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  9. P.S. the plethora of weak to very weak predictors in the literature are not (mostly) wrong (some contradict, so I guess a modest minority are wrong), but just of secondary or tertiary or less importance compared to cultural identity (as invested in climate catastrophism and / or religion, on a national basis).

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  10. Andy
    I think public support for “green” policies is covered by one of Roger Pielke’s Iron Laws.

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  11. Andy,

    Thanks for that considered response. We can do no more than undertake a thought experiment – if the BBC, schools, universities, nurseries, children’s books and even the Guardian stopped banging on about climate change, would the public still be concerned about it, or would they forget about it and move on to something else?

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  12. ‘the better variable is how firm is the support for climate change. I suspect it is very soft and squishy.‘

    That I believe is exactly the position in the UK. The constant propaganda causes most people to feel that of course something must be done about climate change – hence YouGov’s recent finding that 71% of respondents support support the Net Zero policy. However a remarkable 55% said that the statement ‘Policies to reduce carbon emissions should only be introduced if they do not result in additional costs for ordinary people‘ was closest to their view (another 5% thought policies to reduce emissions should not be introduced at all). Recent Ipsos studies have had a similar result. What’s happening I believe is this: although people consider Net Zero important in theory, it’s seen as far less important than their top concerns (the cost of living and immigration) and therefore, when the policy directly impacts the cost of living, it’s importance fades away. That explains the remarkable Uxbridge by-election result and, if the Tories are clever (unlikely), might have a major influence on the coming General Election. Mid-Bedfordshire may be a first test – and, as it’s adjacent to Bim Afolami’s constituency (Bim is my MP), is of considerable interest to me: see the ‘Draft Note to Bim” thread.

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  13. Chris, yes, ultimately all cultures must yield to reality, otherwise our behaviours would not have become so aligned to them. Pielke’s ‘iron law’ is just a subset instance of this, which is relevant to both the particular culture of climate catastrophism, and very strong constraints (cultures only yield to the minimum extent they must, and hence for the weaker constraints – for instance weaker priority clashes – there are various compromise positions that again at national level depend on the overall cultural position of a nation, so its belief in religiosity not just climate catastrophism). This all means there is in fact more push-back due to reality-constraints within religious countries than secular countries, whereas virtue signalling alignment to climate catastrophism is the reverse of this, it is much higher in religious countries than in secular ones.

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  14. Robin: “What’s happening I believe is this: although people consider Net Zero important in theory, it’s seen as far less important than their top concerns (the cost of living and immigration) and therefore, when the policy directly impacts the cost of living, it’s importance fades away.”

    This is exactly what’s happening, and it is happening exactly because the public belief in climate catastrophism is *cultural*, which is to say emotive, irrational. This disparity you point out is a classic signal of cultural behaviour. If the public belief was rational, then there would not be this huge disparity or ‘gap’ between (unconstrained) virtue signalling attitudes, and attitudes when subject to constraints (like cost, or relative priorities); instead the two positions would be far more consistent, based upon an actual level of priority relative to other real issues.

    But this ‘gap’ varies systemically, and hugely, between countries, and also depends on the emotive strength that provokes the virtue signalling attitude, and the constraint strength that provokes the more reality based attitude. So, you describe how the gap is often seen between the most emotive support for catastrophism, and very strong constraints such as policy cost, in a very secular nation like the UK. But in such nations, for instance, support for only weakly emotive virtue signalling attitudes can actually exceed support that is still expressed when only weak constraints apply. Whereas in religious countries this never happens, the gap is always huge between all virtue signalling support (which is far higher than in secular countries), and all support when constraints of any strength apply (which is all lower than in secular countries). What is happening here in essence, is that the fairy-tale cultural narrative of religion, while emotively aligned to catastrophism (hence high virtue signalling), cuts in to protect religious societies from the reality down-sides of belief in catastrophism when the chips are down and real cost or priority is called for. In other words, the deeper values of religion protect society from Net Zero consequences, and despite higher virtue signalling there. No such protection exists in very secular Western nations, so despite the ‘gap’ you point out, the support for Net Zero policies and their degree of penetration (this can be measured for things like renewables commitment), is far higher than in religious nations.

    While cultures always yield to reality (albeit only as much as they absolutely have to), it’s also the case, as you imply, that if reality is shielded by the culture from publics, the true constraint strengths aren’t known and so only apply much more weakly. So in short, as is intuitive, the more publics find out about the downsides of Net Zero, the stronger will the constraints be in their minds, and in any country, the less they will support related policies. Understanding why these things occur, however, allows us to have a far more nuanced map of what to expect in different nations, for any particular virtue signalling or reality based proposition.

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  15. Virtue signallers gonna virtue signal when it’s cheap and easy – and voluntary. But when virtue signalling is made compulsory and incurs considerable personal expense, that’s when people start to dig their heels in. That’s one dynamic which is in play. Another dynamic is that support for net zero is not just beginning to fray because of the costs of virtue signalling one’s adherence to a cultural belief system, the cultural belief system itself is beginning to break down and more and more people are realising they have been scammed by their governments and by activist, politicised ‘science’.

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  16. Mark: ‘We can do no more than undertake a thought experiment – if the BBC, schools, universities, nurseries, children’s books and even the Guardian stopped banging on about climate change, would the public still be concerned about it, or would they forget about it and move on to something else?’

    This is like saying , for a country that is still very religious, like say Greece for a Christian one, or even more so Pakistan for a Muslim one, would the public forget forget about sin and religious observance of many kinds, and marriage within the church and all the rest, if we magically removed all the priests, all the bibles (or Korans), all the churches (or mosques), all religious printed works and opinion pieces, all religious politicians and all other representations of religion, would the public forget about it and move on? Well in time, perhaps they might, or maybe for a very religious country they would simply replace all the religious infra-structure we’d magicked away.

    Well the belief in climate catastrophism even in places like the secular UK, is still far less established than the main local religion was here, and still is in many countries (in fact a majority). So maybe the public would be more inclined to move on than to replace catastrophism’s infra-structure. But the point is that the two scenarios are the same in principle, and really are impossible even for a thought experiment. There’s an implicit assumption in this experiment that all the things we magic away are somehow separate from the public and hence the public attitudes, but they are not, they are intricately bound into public beliefs (and rejections) at every level, and also they *are* the culture in a sense. I think what you are asking is ‘if you take away everything a culture actually is, except a public memory of it, does the culture still exist?’ Well a public memory of the culture is also still part of the culture. But whatever the answer is, I don’t think it moves us forward in any way. We know that all those culturally captured institutions you mention promote the culture, I don’t think it matters what would happen if we magicked them away, because we can’t anyhow 0:

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  17. Jaime: Yes, spot on. But I’m not sure ‘breaking down’ is the words I’d use yet. Perhaps ‘yielding’ is better. Cultures are incredibly hard to defeat, very opportunistic (so catastrophism has pivoted to take advantage of circumstances arising from covid for instance), and only yield to the minimum extent they need to. What happens if catastrophism yields only to the extent of keeping the lights on, and (expensively) keeping the heating on, but still keeps a cultural grip on the big majority of its supporters and emotive entanglements for society generally. Despite this would be a kind of victory, it would still an immense presence and likely problem in many spheres, and may yet pivot towards doing a whole other bunch of irrational things which we can’t yet conceive of 0:

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  18. Andy,

    “Cultures are incredibly hard to defeat, very opportunistic (so catastrophism has pivoted to take advantage of circumstances arising from covid for instance) . . . . . . ”

    Whether a conscious, deliberate decision, or a subconscious survival instinct, I think this naked ‘build back better’ opportunism was a mistake on the part of the catastrophists. It has woken more people up to the fraudulent aspects of ‘crisis creation and management’ by state and corporate actors than it has convinced more people of the existential threat of climate change. Also, many of those people previously convinced of the pressing need for rapid decarbonisation, in light of what has happened with Covid, might now be less convinced. I believe that’s why the powers that be are offering so much more stick than carrot now and are so desperate to plug us with extreme weather/climate change propaganda on a daily basis. We’re beginning to see desperation from the cult leaders.

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  19. Jaime: “I think this naked ‘build back better’ opportunism was a mistake on the part of the catastrophists. It has woken more people up to the fraudulent aspects of ‘crisis creation and management’ by state and corporate actors than it has convinced more people of the existential threat of climate change.”

    I do think it has woken more people up. But it has also allowed the culture to take big advantage in ways it couldn’t before. These things are not incompatible, it simply means that the situation is more polarised than before, i.e. with more support or leverage for both sides. But who knows where that equation will go, or where it will end?

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  20. Andy: you say, in response to my comment (that what’s happening in the UK is that, although people consider Net Zero important in theory, they see it as far less important than their top concerns – the cost of living and immigration – and that therefore, when the policy directly impacts the cost of living, it’s importance fades away), that their view of Net Zero is ‘emotive, irrational‘. I disagree. I suggest it’s wholly rational and in no sense emotive to believe that doing something about climate change (i.e. cutting emissions), which many scientists say is necessary, is important and therefore desirable. However the fact that something is desirable doesn’t make it essential. In contrast, fixing the cost of living and solving illegal immigration are seen as essential. And, as requiring people to themselves pay to solve the inessential climate problem would obviously worsen the essential cost of living problem, its importance drops way down the priority list. I don’t see a cultural issue there.

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  22. Jamie, Andy,

    This paper-
    How people decide who is correct when groups of scientists disagree – Johnson – Risk Analysis – Wiley Online Library https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/risa.14204

    Abstract
    “Uncertainty that arises from disputes among scientists seems to foster public skepticism or noncompliance. Communication of potential cues to the relative performance of contending scientists might affect judgments of which position is likely more valid. We used actual scientific disputes—the nature of dark matter, sea level rise under climate change, and benefits and risks of marijuana—to assess Americans’ responses (n = 3150) …..”

    may be of interest as it likely tries to address “Cultures are incredibly hard to defeat’ or understand.

    We spent our disposable income, this month, researching the particulars around my grandfather being in an infirmary in France in October of 1918. It seems both sides of my family experienced bioweapons up close and personal.

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  25. Robin, the social data from a wide range of independent source, all agree and completely contradict the position you state. Look at Figures 7 (and 8 for nuance) in my book (free PDF available). The climate-change most-endorsing responses to unconstrained questions, across nations, are wildly different to the climate-change most-endorsing responses to reality-constrained questions, and there is no explanation based upon rationality that can accommodate this, yet it is exactly what we would expect from a model of cultural causation (and also interaction between religiosity and climate catastrophism).

    I believe you are thinking that publics understand climate-change in a similar manner to you (and indeed many others on blogs such as this, where knowledge about climate change vastly exceeds that of general publics within any country). This is simply not the case. Climate-change information received by the vast majority of publics in any nation, who are just trying to get on with their lives and don’t look into it, is purely cultural, the kind of catastrophe narrative given out by presidents and prime ministers and high ministers and religious leaders and NGOs and nearly all the mainstream media and uncle Tom Cobbly and all. It is clear in the data that this causes both emotive acceptance and emotive rejection, and also both at the same time but in different scenarios, but of rationality there is little to no sign.

    However, your logical approach to the issue exactly highlights the reason for public responses of this kind. They simply do not know that climate change is an issue not a catastrophe, as you do, which indeed they’d deal with rationally if this was the case. For them it is catastrophe or nothing, which is why this is either *emotively* accepted, or rejected, or both simultaneously, depending upon the scenario. If you can say why the data is wrong, or you have any alternate data that challenges the very many surveys that all point to this same conclusion, then by all means present it. No doubt there are very small minorities that think exactly as you say, but at national level these appear to be too small to make any real impact on the net attitudes.

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  26. Kakatoa: I haven’t read this paper before, and it is paywalled, but it seems likely it has something useful to offer. If it is using US data though (I thought it might be, because of the Marijuana question, and also the lead author has published other papers based on US data), then this can be both good and bad in different ways, because the tribal political polarization there makes cultural effects much easier to find, but it also means they may not apply in quite the same manner elsewhere (for climate change, there is a 4-way cultural interaction in the US, but only -2way that really matters in the rest-of-world). Also, disputes about say dark matter, which are never going to excite main public interest never mind conflict, are completely different to those that do, such as a proposed main effect or policy related to climate change. These should not really be treated as similar, though I don’t know the context within which the paper examined each issue.

    Because society is so conflicted in the US on a wide range of science-related social issues, there tends to be much more research on this area there. While nuances abound, I think the most stable main conclusion is that in major social conflicts around science issues, like evolution, climate change, genetically modified crops and others, the public tend to support the science that best aligns to their values, and reject the science that doesn’t align to their values. This means that virtually nobody is being anti-science as such (they all invoke science in defending the stuff they like) but, as social psychologist Dan Kahan has shown, it is essentially cultural identity that matters, because it is this that sets their values in the first place. Because there is such a dramatic split in (tribal political) cultural identities within the US population, this is why so much socially relevant science is disputed; and even for the folks that may be on the ‘right’ side, such as rejecting climate-change catastrophism, for the majority this is an instinctive rejection not a rational one; not least because they don’t have significant knowledge to feed rationality.

    But in general, for sure you are right that genuine uncertainties in science give scope for cultures to leap in, and hence this does indeed make it very hard to get rid of them from the subject again, defeat them, even if in the meantime the main scientific uncertainties (such as for evolution) have long since been removed!

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  27. Catweazle: I haven’t run the figures for the climate change seriousness question mentioned in the article yet, i.e. from the 2022 Gallup world risk poll (which was performed for Lloyds). But the change they note from 2019 seems to be barely enough to be out of the error margin, if indeed it is, and I did run the 2019 figures for this question. The result is in the chart below, against a *purely cultural* x-axis of national religiosity, and reflects exactly what one expects from cultural causation.

    The article wisely doesn’t speculate too much about *why* the regions they quote have the measured attitudes (although they imply there’s a contradiction), but in fact it has nothing whatsoever to do with their climate exposure anyhow, or indeed anything rational. The way the question is asked means that it has a mix of unconstrained and reality-constrained elements (‘mixed-mode’). The former alone would produce a trendline that is marked by the blue ‘MSA’ line. The latter alone would produce a trendline that is marked by the orange ‘WC’ line. As both elements are present within the same question, then nations simply drift between the two linear trendlines according to secondary or tertiary local factors (and straddle these trendlines to some extent in the normal manner of data around a trend), because these are the only two cultural poles that matter. We can deduce some of the secondary leanings for religio-regional groups (which are colour-coded and ringed), as these appear only in certain regions of the chart, but that is not what is most important.

    I was expecting a few nations in the top-right corner, at least between 80-90% on the y-axis, and there are none there. I don’t know whether this is just unlucky and I need more nations, or there is some nuance I don’t understand, but everything else is about what I’d expect from a response to a mixed-mode question. I need to check that the question retained the same form in 2022, though they usually do for regular polls, otherwise they can’t compare the data.

    https://wearenarrative.files.wordpress.com/2023/08/lloyds-risk-2019-seriousness-of-cc.png?resize=320%2C320

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  29. Ron, he’s a fantastic author, but I think history has again and again shown us that this is fundamentally wrong. Many classic cases clearly show that rampant cultures can easily convert random swathes of publics, or even those who are sworn to protect us all (‘do no harm’ doctors for instance, and I’m not talking about the ones who made it up the slippery pole to be in some elite position, but average ordinary GPs for instance, like the ones who *off their own initiative* and without command, killed ‘sub-standard’ children in Nazi Germany), into tools of the cultural purpose, who can do bad to appalling things in its name. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t apply the full weight of justice to them, should justice ever prevail over whatever culture it is, of course, but the lesson of the Holocaust and many similar lessons is not that it could never happen again because those folks were especially nasty and politically controlling, but that it could happen at any time because out-of-control cultures can easily mean that your pleasant neighbours you used to go out drinking with and playing skittles or whatever, would happily burn you at the stake one day because you don’t share a belief in the fairy story narrative that has gripped their mind, and unfortunately for you was culturally ascendant enough to mean it had trampled over the law that would otherwise have defended you. Even in the relatively small and mild culture surrounding extreme trans rights for instance, it has ordinary teachers preaching pornography and ordinary doctors vectoring vulnerable children into appalling biological and drug interventions. These professionals are not seeking some kind of political control, they have the belief bug and they have it bad, they truly believe they’re on the right side of history; we should throw everything the law can muster at them, but only a few years ago, before they got the bug, they were us. It is a massive underestimation of these phenomena to abdicate analysis and say ‘it’s just some controlling people’; we will never fix such things if we haven’t the courage to face up to how they work, because it’s uncomfortable to think that but for fate, any of us could be sucked into those cultural machines. I’ve known many people from whose eyes the light of climate change belief shines; they are in every way completely normal, and not at all subject to some ‘politically controlling’ gene or other equivalent innate factor.

    Liked by 1 person

  30. Robin – botheration, I got the wrong figure number – sorry! It is Figure 5 (basic) and Figure 8 (extra series / nuances). Figure 7 shows very similar patterns when interrogating religion in the same manner.

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  31. Andy: I’m not going to respond to your reply to my comment today – although I will in due course. In the meantime, I’ll set out here some personal background that I suggest is relevant together with two useful links and some requests.

    First, HERE’s a very brief personal profile – and HERE’s a note on why I’m agnostic about climate science. To get a more detailed view of my principal interest re climate change you might find it interesting to read THIS. My other interest is how climate change impacts the UK re politics and public attitudes – to some extent is coloured by my role as the founder-chair of an online healthcare research company, an experience that’s given me a professional insight into the interpretation of opinion surveys.

    Next, I was unable to open some of the links you provided in Appendix C of your paper. Two examples: (1) the extraordinarily interesting UN ‘myworld’ survey – however, I have a screenshot of the 2018 version: https://postimg.cc/ZCx8bL36 – Click on ‘Download original image’ (and then expand for better view of detail); and (2) I couldn’t open the DECC Wave 13 public attitudes tracker, but consider this recent version probably more useful.

    Finally, I’d be grateful if you’d provide me with links to some of the detailed questionnaires and responses in the UK that obtained the most-endorsing responses to unconstrained questions and the most-endorsing responses to reality-constrained questions – just a few please of the ‘very many surveys’. And I’d like to see, again re the UK, some examples of ‘catastrophe narrative’ published by prime ministers and senior ministers. Also I’d be interested to learn your definition of ‘catastrophism’: usually a term used in geology to describe the theory that changes in the earth’s crust were the result of sudden violent and unusual events – are you referring to similarly sudden changes in the climate? Or to something else?

    I look forward to seeing your response to these latter points.

    Liked by 1 person

  32. Andy, a lot to think about in this thread and in your response to me. First, an aside regarding your main point about the power of culture and no innate immunity against it. When I was a management consultant, I met with a CEO who declared in the conversation: “Corporate culture doesn’t exist. It was invented by consultants to make money.” Of course, he was both wrong and right as we have seen in recent years.

    The blindness to culture is like that of a fish unaware of the water in which he swims. A great proof of corporate culture was provided by some biz school profs who did a study to determine which approach to performance improvement (quality circles, process redesign, etc.) was most successful. To their surprise it didn’t matter which program. What mattered was whether top management believed in it and persisted in implementation to get results. Proof that the corporate culture at that time was top down. Behavior and attitudes in a company were those that top management encouraged or allowed. It was exemplified in the classic comment from a middle manager: “What interests my boss thrills the hell out of me.”

    But the CEO was also right as shown by the rapid rise of the DIE consultancy industry who along with CRT and genderism “experts.” have indeed made a lot of money. And they overturned both private and public institutional cultures. Most CEOs these days seem scared of their employees, and one wonders how anything gets done.

    But back to your issue: What makes the difference between the adherents and the dissenters of climatism? We all know about the madness of the human herds. And the rest of the quote is “They only come to their senses slowly, and one by one. “ What is it about the one lemming who says: “This makes no sense. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, and I will take no further step until you show it.”

    That is where Heinlein is on to something about individuals pushed too far. And as the Koonin quote suggests, there is also a moral backbone that refuses to go along with the craziness and suffering inflicted.

    Liked by 3 people

  33. Robin, I’m going to skip your profile. Arguments will stand on their own 🙂

    The UN closed down, and eventually removed from the Internet, all instantiations of their 2015 My World survey. You could type in individual countries or profiles and it would dredge up the data for you. For a few years, a memory archive of this still worked (albeit incredibly slowly), however more recently that avenue was cut-off too, you can now only see the initial landing page. I don’t think they liked climate change coming dead last in this survey across the world (it’s a reality-constrained survey). However, the data I captured is in the excel file noted below (as is the archive link). Their new 2030 My World, with some partial results in, now replaces it, and they’ve changed the form so that it becomes a ‘lifted’ reality-constrained survey (see Chapter 10 for explanations of the same, the partial 2030 data is in the same Excel file). Any used ‘waves’ of the WVS ongoing survey, should have working links in the Excel file.

    All the charts, and all their data and links to sources for all the series I use from many pollsters and governmental orgs are available in the two Excel reference files that go with the book, hence including all the original survey questions too. The files are listed on page 5 of the book. All are at the same weblink as the free PDF for the book, given at the bottom of this post. One small file is for ‘religion only’, the other has everything else.

    It is impossible to determine what is really happening by only looking at any one country, whether the UK or elsewhere, because you are only seeing a tiny slice of a pattern that systemically changes across all nations, in an incredibly robust and reliable manner, giving extremely strong correlations that obsolete the existing literature (which wasn’t looking for a global cultural phenomenon, or any cultural phenomenon). So all of the ‘very many surveys’ are *international* (or for a small few, Europe only). Although the UK is very frequently surveyed, so it’s within most of them, I don’t think it’s in every one (especially Europe after we left). For international (or Europe) climate attitude surveys, I have maybe about 45 series from about 20 different surveys (as per the reply to catweazle, this includes a couple of ‘historic’ ones too, for a timeline), from maybe about a dozen institutions (mostly mainstream pollsters, but some academic or other ones too). They *all* fit the single straightforward model of cultural causation, as represented by Figure 5 (basic) or Figure 8 (with all the bells and whistles).

    There’s about a dozen more for the US (which is different to the rest-of-world, because 4 cultures matter there, whereas only 2 matter elsewhere), but with this difference, they all fit the expected patterns too (this is covered in Chapter 11). There are another 10 or so for ‘religion only’, which prove you that get the expected cultural patterns by interrogating something that is indisputably a culture, in the same manner as is done for climate catastrophism.

    ‘Climate catastrophism’ refers to the name of the culture (there is stuff on definition of terms in the first part of the book), and so is equivalent to ‘Catholicism’, or ‘Communism’, say. The culture of climate catastrophism is transmitted by the vehicle of ‘catastrophe narrative’ (all cultures have a main, umbrella narrative, under which there is a population of dynamically changing narrative variants). The narrative population for catastrophe narrative is described in Chapter 5, with many variant examples including some from the UK (although just as with the survey data, one needs samples from across the globe to see its true breadth and nature). The chapter explains how a selection of the most common variants, such as say ‘terminal metaphor’ or ‘anxiety for children’ or whatever, work. There are far more variant examples, around 200 or so, in the Catastrophe Narrative archive companion (Word) file, which is at the same place as the Excel files. These are categorised in groups, with clickable references to the original sources for every quote (or a memory archive if the original had gone dark), and there is also a clickable list of quotes by the quotee at the end of the file. The archive finishes at some point in late 2018, because that’s when I used it in a guest post at Climate Etc, there have been many many quotes since then of course, but I’ve not had time to categorise and add these, it is quite laborious, though I hope to do so at least to the extent of doubling the archive, say, which should cover most new threads of interest with multiple examples of each.

    The ‘catastrophe’ in ‘catastrophe narrative’ has no rational definition, because it is not understood by publics rationally, it is only perceived emotively (rationality is bypassed!) as a sign of membership of the culture of climate catastrophism (or for some people, a rejection of same). It is similarly not understood by the presidents, prime ministers etc etc throughout a long list of authority sources, rationally; it convinces emotively and it is emotively propagated. But you could conceive of it as a kind of average, or maybe a backbone (from the most common), of all the very many catastrophe narrative variants.

    Note: The book is entirely one of social psychology; as noted within the introduction it doesn’t get into the physical climate, or climate science at all. However, the one place where I do use a climate science position, is in a secondary confirmation of narratives found by social analysis to be cultural. These should also be false, because, in order to fulfil purpose (see Chapter 3) all strong cultural narratives are false. And indeed catastrophe narrative does contradict what I take as the ‘gold standard’ for science, which is the mainstream / IPCC position as represented by the working group chapters (for AR5 and 6). As well as a paper confirming that indeed no concept of global catastrophe is described by this science (from a climate orthodox not sceptical author), I’ve been through the entire of AR5 myself to check all possible references that might refer to anything like this, and there are none. AR6 is little different, but I’m relying on others such as Pielke Jr for its characterisation, as it is very laborious to do what I did with AR5 0:

    Happy hunting!

    https://www.thegwpf.org/publications/culture/

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  34. Ron: “That is where Heinlein is on to something about individuals pushed too far. And as the Koonin quote suggests, there is also a moral backbone that refuses to go along with the craziness and suffering inflicted.”

    Re Heinlein, if you contextualize it in this manner, it starts to be more acceptable, but the problem with the ‘meme’ version of the words is that there is no context, and in this form it is as close to straight wrong as makes no difference, and also undermines attempts to find out what’s really going on, instead of the simple course of blaming mythical bogey-men.

    Koonin is close to the money I think. But with the exception that even our very morals can be undermined by cultures. One of the highest human morals is to protect children (indeed to the extent that some cultures, like climate catastrophism, riff off this to help make their living), but extreme trans rights culture has caused otherwise normal people to ditch this high moral, and feel they’re on the right side of history into the bargain, for doing so. But yes you’re right that, fortunately, because humans and their social behaviours are extremely diverse, there will always be some in any particular domain of threat, who make a stand. However, I doubt whether this is an inalienable characteristic of only a few angelic people, they are probably in the right place at the right time, though simultaneously one cannot dilute their incredibly bravery compared to others that may have had the same opportunity yet flunked it; and I think it highly likely that the possibility of being captured by the bad side, exists for us all.

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  35. Robin, P.S. I misunderstood the ‘wave’ link you meant. On the ‘Main Trends’ page of the Excel-ref, at cell H135, is a clickable link to this, which appears to come up with the right sort of stuff. Maybe there’s a typo in the book rendition of the link. This is one of the few data-points that constrain the ‘FC’ line, which itself is estimated by dividing the ‘WC’ line by 6 (there’s an explanation for this in the book), because there is no fully constrained series for most countries, and none that have the same wording across a large range of countries. So FC isn’t a real trendline, it’s a data-constrained estimate from another data-set.

    Liked by 1 person

  36. P.S. Robin, I think all the series that actually make it into the book as a printed chart (quite a few don’t, they are just briefly referenced from the Excel-Ref), have the original question text plus measured response in a table, or for a single series typically as part of the explanatory text, which will be very near the chart in the physical book. Ditto for parameters like r-squared and p.

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  37. I’m sorry Andy but I’m not persuaded. It seems to me that it’s wholly rational for people to support net zero (unsurprising in view of day-in day-out propaganda) yet oppose the imposition of personally damaging policies said to be necessary for its implementation. In my view, that’s no more a matter of ‘cultural causation’ or interaction with ‘religiosity’ than are supporting the abolition of world poverty while declining to pay towards the cost of achieving it, supporting the death penalty for murder while opposing it for women bullied by their partners or supporting clean air in London while opposing ULEZ. You say there are very many surveys that show I’m wrong – in which case it’s unfortunate, and frankly surprising, that you seem to be unable to cite even one regarding relevant opinion in the UK.

    A different point. I was disappointed at your inability to define ‘catastrophism’ – despite it’s being a key concept in your book. My disappointment was initially based on the fact that it’s a term used in geology for the theory that changes in the earth’s crust over time have resulted chiefly from sudden violent and unusual events (such a meteor impact), rather than from gradual evolutionary processes – the latter, which is the prevailing theory today, is known as ‘uniformitarianism’: LINK. Your use of the term puzzled me at first as I thought you must somehow be referring to a theory that climate change would be sudden and violent rather than incremental – which is I think, as in geology, the orthodox view. But it seems not.

    It’s a pity that you chose not to read my very short profile. I cited it because it shows that, while I‘m trained in the law, I’ve had no training in science and am therefore agnostic about the claims of climate change science. Hence my position on climate is probably not so very different from that of the general public for whom I suggest it’s simply not, as you say, ‘catastrophe or nothing’ – I think you may be underestimating the intelligence of many so-called ordinary people.

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  38. “You say there are very many surveys that show I’m wrong – in which case it’s unfortunate, and frankly surprising, that you seem to be unable to cite even one regarding relevant opinion in the UK.”

    Goodness me! I’ve cited dozens of series which sample the UK, as I very clearly pointed out. You cannot have looked at the data at all to not notice this 0: Not to mention not even reading my intro above! But the key to understanding the phenomenon is to see the data in *every* nation, because it is extremely and systemically and reliably *different* within each one. And it is this that helps so much to lead us to the explanation for the results in *all* nations, including the UK. Given that the data is clearly not remotely the same in nations as one travels across the x-axis in my charts, why on Earth would you insist on leaving out 63 64ths of the data? (64 is how many nations I cover to date). The UK data-points are perfectly valid and very useful, and nearly all of the international surveys I chart do indeed include our own nation. However, if you crafted an explanation valid for this UK data *alone*, while not allowing yourself to peek at the other countries, what then would be your explanation for every other nation, when it is suddenly revealed to you that they all have enormously different data? Are you then going to craft a different explanation for every nation? Despite the great differences between nations clearly have a fixed pattern across many independent data-sets? This would utterly fail the rule of parsimony! I am gob-smacked at your position here; I am struggling to believe that you mean this, and perhaps I have misunderstood, yet you seem so clear.

    This fails even the most basic principle of investigation, not to mention that you’re denying there is UK data when there are dozens of UK data points for every type of survey question (various strengths of reality-constrained, unconstrained, either of those ‘lifted’, ‘mixed-mode’ etc etc). If you mean no exclusive “UK only” data – why would you want to use this when different survey wordings mean you can’t compare it with the results elsewhere? Or why would you think a survey that has UK data is invalid, if it happens also to cover France or Sweden or Turkey? This makes no sense.

    “A different point. I was disappointed at your inability to define ‘catastrophism’ – despite it’s being a key concept in your book.”

    This is incredible. To date only one persistent orthodox yapper at another place has made this basic error. The term is perfectly well defined, as I noted above; it is the name of the cultural entity based upon the (climate) catastrophe narrative. When I say in turn that catastrophe narrative is not rationally understood by publics, this clearly does not mean that we suddenly don’t know the definition of the word catastrophe, which is where you have gone. This would just be bonkers. The umbrella theme of catastrophe narrative is something like ‘imminent (decades) global climate catastrophe’, yet there are very many ways this theme is expressed by different variants of the narrative (as comprehensively described in chapter 5, and with a very big list of examples of quotes that you asked for, in the archive file, including many from the UK). However, there is clearly no rational logic-path or science that could lead to any of these variants being true – so why do so many believe the narrative? – because they are *emotively* convinced, not *rationally* convinced. So the fact that the narrative is not rationally understood by publics, in no way means that the term ‘catastrophe narrative’, or a cultural entity based upon it and hence called ‘climate catastrophism’, is in any way ‘undefined’. And this is so whether or not public attitudes are primarily cultural (i.e. whether the theory is true or not). Goodness me, do I need a spoon?

    “I think you may be underestimating the intelligence of many so-called ordinary people”

    It has nothing to do with intelligence!! This is clear in all of my writings. Falling to cultural belief, or indeed rejection, can happen to anyone of any type or demographic. If there is any slight difference, there is some indication that more educated and cognitively capable people exhibit somewhat *stronger* cultural belief, not weaker, but it’s likely a second order effect and it is early research anyhow, so may not be upheld.

    “It’s a pity that you chose not to read my very short profile.”

    It’s in your interests. If I don’t know ‘who’ you are, I am much less likely to be biased for or against you in some manner, and hence I can assess your arguments more objectively. And sometimes too I like to be surprised, its good for the soul and good for science. However, I didn’t have this kind of surprise in mind. I have always admired the logic and tenacity of your efforts in the comment sections of various newspapers, clearly intelligence, logic and immense patience are not an issue for you. I can only assume some very peculiar blind spot – I’m sure that if you saw one of the many commenters who give you grief in such comments columns making missteps of this kinds, you would surely groan. I recall my editor, Andrew Montford, he of the Hockey Stick Illusion, saying at the first pass of my material that a lot of stuff was unintuitive, and maybe you’ve somehow slipped into in a veil of this, but even though my presentation was crap compared to the super state he raised it to, from day 1 he was a million miles ahead of this and it was more to do with stuff about how cultures work. Not apparently having the first clue what I’m even talking about is I guess a perfectly valid reason to not believe my theory, and no doubt you can reasonably lay poor expression at my door, but it’s still the last reason I would have expected from what little I have seen of you 0:

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  39. P.S. added to which as noted way way above, this data anyhow agrees exactly with your surmise about the realities of Net Zero making themselves felt. It is what this pushback opposes that is cultural, what has gripped society and so many of our institutions for so long, and what has caused such a wide difference between fairy-tale ideals that have subverted so much of society and especially children, and realities that are at last, though sadly only because of adversity, emerging. As the series of reality-constrained lines show, the culture of catastrophism will retreat in proportion to reality, but that reality has to be exposed for it to happen. Without any knowledge of any of my social data, or any social data whatsoever, finding that this hold upon practically all of our institutions, our schools, councils, even the damn health service, the food industry, the media (to the point, before GB news, of being a basket case on climate), of course the energy sector, and endless ranks of moral climate police plus cults wandering the streets, is all due to rationality, would it not be the case that people would think this just far too incredible? And if it is not due to rationality, and you are ruling out cultural causation, that only leaves a massive conspiracy 0:

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  40. “…abolition of world poverty while declining to pay towards the cost of achieving it, supporting the death penalty for murder while opposing it for women bullied by their partners or supporting clean air in London while opposing ULEZ.”

    There is no massive ‘poverty abolition’ phenomenon that has captured our institutions and children and laws and practically everything else as noted above. There is no massive ‘death penalty’ phenomenon that has captured our institutions and children and laws and practically everything else as noted above. There is not even a massive ‘clean air’ phenomenon that has captured our institutions and children and laws and practically everything else as noted above. ULEZ has only made it so far because it has managed to edge itself under the outer wing of the climate change issue, along with 15 minute cities etc. It is the hypocrisy of that position which is exposing it to attack, especially when it appears that the parallel operation about ‘cleaner air’ may in any case have been from biased study, and the effect could be negligible. There *is* a massive ‘climate catastrophe’ phenomenon that has captured our institutions and children and laws and practically everything else as noted above.

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  41. Andy: I started this exchange by saying I agreed with Chris Morris that support for ‘climate action’ in the UK is ‘very soft and squishy.‘ And that I suggested explains why, as Net Zero is seen as far less important than people’s top concerns, it’s salience fades away when they are faced by the practical realities of everyday life.

    That’s still my position. So it would seem best if we simply agreed to disagree.

    Best wishes – and good luck with the book. Robin

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  42. Robin, but as I just noted above, we *don’t* disagree upon that aspect anyway. As some knowledge of Net Zero downsides and hidden costs starts to make headway, and looking at the UK particularly, where at least some of the mainstream media are now belatedly doing their job in this respect at last, and GB News having enervated the situation especially, then indeed the ideals of NZ purpose must eventually slide downwards compared to the practical realities of life such as surviving inflation and consequent huge mortgage hikes and what have you, even *without* paying the huge rises in energy or transport costs that NZ entails (and not to mention these days worrying instead about whether your children are also being taught that there is no such thing as biology or are being transitioned behind your back!) This won’t make the road easy, in the sense that the ideals will still be fiercely defended by adherents, but even cultures can’t ultimately argue with hard reality.

    The interesting thing is that, because the patterns I note have been stable since at least 2015, then someone cleverer and quicker off the mark than me could have predicted the above from right back then, long before any of the current downside knowledge now seeping through to the public had started to do so. (I only began to gather the data around November 2019 because I knew by then I should see something, and it probably took 18 months to fill out the big picture, after which covid pushed climate off the main spot for a couple of years, and amid which the very serious upgrade of material to achieve a book started). This is because downside knowledge is only one way of increasing reality constraints, and there are others, such as ranking more and more other policy issues alongside say ‘taking action on climate change’. This method indeed showed that support will fade to miniscule numbers within all countries, *if* the reality constraints are high enough. And because this method doesn’t include any public (downside or other) knowledge (‘taking action on climate change’ isn’t even a policy specific statement, and in 2015 publics had way way less knowledge than now about what this might entail too), then it also showed that this complete lack of backbone for support will occur even without relevant knowledge. I think this is ultimately the reason why the UN was so diligent in removing all memory of its 2015 My World survey, which despite only being a weak constraint – nominating 6 issues of 17, whereas nominating say 1 of 12 would be far stronger – action on climate change came dead last, after ~10 million votes!

    For years and years you’ve been fighting tirelessly to make clear to people high and low, facts that ought to be blindingly obvious, and although many others play their part in this fight, if there were medals for it I think you’d get one for high impact and another for sheer staying power. And both against a foe who in most years past has seemed to hold all of the cards and have a huge financial, media, and manpower advantage. It has occurred to me that if you do not think all these years of struggle are pitched against a culture, then what on Earth is it you that think you are fighting? Well, never mind, I guess I don’t need to know. And good luck in your continued campaign, highlighting the complete lack of difference a UK NZ will make; at least in recent years there are more fruits of success 🙂

    Liked by 1 person

  45. Thanks, Mark M. This is actually a different UN survey to the ‘MyWorld 2015’ that the UN has disappeared. The latter had over 10 million participants, sampled over a few years, whereas this one had only 8685 who were all sampled live on the same day. Having said that, it may have useful data that I haven’t seen before, but the sample size of 100 per country may lead to a lot of noise (500 is the usual minimum, and more often 1000), and there might also be selection bias as it is implied they weren’t just picked at random too. But it’s worth a look-see at the data 🙂

    Liked by 1 person

  47. Thanks, Catweazle. But unfortunately this only gives the top level figures, which are still around in a few places (though most of these disappeared too). The original website was essentially a menu driven data-hub where you could type in the country or demographic you want, and it would go and fetch the data. It is that data which is no longer available, and unfortunately, because I didn’t realise it was going to disappear (this hub still worked in archive form at the Wayback Machine for a while), I only retrieved the climate-change response data for about 50 countries out of the 194 total. I should have grabbed them all. It’s disappearance also means that people now have to take my word that the data is genuine, because there is nowhere to point to where this can be verified. You can still see how the hub was meant to work at the archive link below, but now if you type in the fields nothing ever happens. When it did still work at this archive, it took 5 or 6 minutes to come back with any single result, but at least it still worked. Then even this got nobbled.

    http://web.archive.org/web/20190802231507/http:/data.myworld2015.org/

    But by all means keep looking, it would be nice to have this data!

    Liked by 1 person

  48. Ron- “Corporate culture doesn’t exist. It was invented by consultants to make money.” Of course, he was both wrong and right as we have seen in recent years.” brought me back to the 90’s. Fast Cycle product development (1) was in vogue back than and many a master’s theses were written on an effort I worked on.

    It seems E. Holmes didn’t hire, or listen to, Chris as he had some lessons learned on why research efforts don’t work well, or at all, when forced into fast cycle commercialization plans.

    1) http://fastcycle.com/default.htm

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