The point, I suspect, is a headline like this – “US voters linking climate crisis to rising bills despite Trump’s ‘green scam’ claims” – and a secondary headline such as this – “New polling shows 65% of registered US voters believe global heating is affecting cost of living”. Inevitably, perhaps, these are the headings to a Guardian article about a polling report (“Climate Change in the American Mind: Politics & Policy, Fall 2025”) published just over a week ago.
I leave you, dear reader, to peruse the Guardian article, but its concluding paragraph makes it clear that it is delighted to be able to make use of this recent addition to its alarmist armoury:
“Looking at the long-term trajectory, there’s been a huge increase in the proportion of Americans who think climate change should be a priority for the president and Congress,” said Leiserowitz [one of the principal investigators/report authors]. “But with Republicans, this number has basically been flat the whole time. It hasn’t changed much.”
I suppose I should accept that it’s fair enough for the Guardian to report on results that support its agenda of climate alarmism, though it might have noted that the study interviewed only 1,146 adults (18+), just 990 of whom are registered to vote. The authors claim an average margin of error for registered voters of +/- 3 percentage points at the 95% confidence level, but I can’t help thinking that it’s an extremely small sample. Then there’s the question of the funders, which include:
The US Energy Foundation (“U.S. Energy Foundation (EF) is a partnership of philanthropies focused on securing a clean and equitable energy future to tackle the climate crisis….Our goal is to reduce energy-related carbon emissions by over one-third by 2030 compared to a 2005 baseline, putting the U.S. on a trajectory toward an 80 percent carbon reduction consistent with long-term climate protection….”);
The Heising-Simons Foundation (“The Foundation’s Climate and Clean Energy program supports organizations, projects, and coalitions that help advance and implement policies to accelerate progress on clean energy and reduce suffering due to climate change…The program supports efforts primarily in the United States, focused on four strategic areas: advancing climate policy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions; transforming the energy sectors that are the primary source of pollution to accelerate the transition to clean energy; cutting the most potent pollutants, such as methane; and seizing time-sensitive opportunities to achieve large-scale emission reductions.”);
King Philanthropies (a website awash with images of wind turbines);
The Grantham Foundation (“Climate change is the greatest challenge humanity has ever faced. It is the race of our lives”); and
The MacArthur Foundation (a search of its website for the term “climate change” produces 1,931 results).
Perhaps I’m being unfair, but I’d be surprised if those funders would be happy with a survey or poll which produced a result to the effect that US citizens couldn’t care less about climate change. And yet, despite leading questions that label CO2 as pollution, and which refer throughout to renewable energy as “clean” energy, the poll produced a very uncomfortable result, which the Guardian report ignores.
The inconvenient truth revealed by the poll/study/report (call it what you will) is that the registered voters who were questioned really couldn’t care less about climate change (or old-fashioned global warming, as the poll phrased it). They were asked to rank 25 issues in order of importance when deciding how to vote in the 2026 Congressional elections. In 23rd place was “developing clean energy”; it was followed in 24th place by “global warming”; and last among the 25 topics was the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. What would Greta say? Can you guess what came first and second? Yes, you guessed correctly – the economy, followed by the cost of living.
Even an attempt to make the results look a little more palatable by dividing the respondents into different categories of voters didn’t help much. “Liberal Democrats” rated global warming 13th out of the 25 categories, and that’s as good as it got. “Moderate/Conservative Democrats” placed it 17th in their list of concerns; “Liberal/Moderate Republicans” placed it 24th; and Conservative Republicans placed it last.
What does this amount to? Possibly not a lot – after all, it was a lamentably small sample of the US electorate. Still, if the Guardian feels it has to ignore a key (but – for them – very uncomfortable) result from a poll funded by climate alarmist organisations, perhaps it tells us that the worm is turning. Decades of relentless propaganda, billions of dollars/euros/pounds spent funding lobby organisations, 30 UN COPs and all the rest of it, and people still aren’t interested. Perhaps the alarmists should take a lesson from an earlier US politician – what matters to voters is still the economy, stupid.
Climate Scepticism 
Mark,
The authors claim an average margin of error for registered voters of +/- 3 percentage points at the 95% confidence level, but I can’t help thinking that it’s an extremely small sample.
Actually, that sounds about right to me. Sampling theory reveals that one needs remarkably small sample sizes to achieve good margins of error with relatively high confidence levels. You can play with this sample size calculator to confirm this for yourself:
https://www.calculator.net/sample-size-calculator.html
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I think this article came up on a Daily Sceptic news feed, which is the only reason it caught my eye.
The thrust of the survey is preposterous, i.e. that “global heating” and alleged man-made extreme weather events are responsible for rising energy and food bills while pernicious Trump is choking off “often cheapest” wind and solar energy.
The Guardian article is clearly fraudulent and I suspect the survey is as well, perhaps by asking loaded questions.
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John R,
Thanks for the explanation. I confess that the maths around the validity of claims regarding the accuracy of such polling does leave me cold. I will accept your expert opinion, and concede that they do seem to have polled people with a broad spread of political opinions.
Doug B,
I wouldn’t describe the survey or the Guardian article as fraudulent, but as I (more than) hinted in my piece, I think the whole point of the exercise was probably to produce a headline and a narrative to boost the climate alarmist faithful. The nature of the funders is too monolithic for it to be otherwise, IMO. Similarly, the rather brazen spin put on the finding (yet again) that climate change is close to the bottom of most people’s concerns, tells its own story.
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John R is correct about the accuracy of 1,000 person polls, but while I wouldn’t be surprised that a lot of people are still ‘concerned’ by global warming (or whatever the brand du jour is), the important question is: “How much would you personally be prepared to spend in order to prevent it?”. The answer usually comes in at less than $100 a year, far below the current costs that are being imposed on the UK and other countries in pursuit of Net Zero.
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Speaking of Guardian alarmism (as I fear I do all too regularly), this is quite funny, really:
“The Guardian view on adapting to the climate crisis: it demands political honesty about extreme weather
Editorial
Over the holiday period, the Guardian leader column is looking ahead at the themes of 2026. Today we look at how the struggle to adapt to a dangerously warming world has become a test of global justice”
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/dec/26/the-guardian-view-on-adapting-to-the-climate-crisis-it-demands-political-honesty-about-extreme-weather
Honesty, eh? It starts thus:
The record-breaking 252mph winds of Hurricane Melissa that devastated Caribbean islands at the end of October were made five times more likely by the climate crisis.…
…What can now be shown is that this warming produces record heatwaves and more violent storms with increasing frequency.…
But even the BBC acknowledges that the US 2025 hurrican season was unusually quiet:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/articles/cz68pd38y7vo
…The 2025 season started with Tropical Storm Andrea on 23 June which was a short-lived storm that remained over open water in the Atlantic. At the end of the month Tropical Storm Barry formed in Mexico’s Bay of Campeche and became the first to strike land, further up the coast near Tampico.
It was closely followed by Tropical Storm Chantal that hit South Carolina on 6 July and brought up to 6 inches of rain and subsequent flash flooding to North Carolina.
This turned out to be the only storm to make landfall in the US which is very unusual in any season. In fact the last time no hurricanes made landfall in the US was a decade ago….
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The truth is not safe in the Guardian’s hands – which is probably ironic at some level. They are telling a story, not reporting the news. It has been clear for a long time that global warming was not scaring anybody, so every adverse weather event had to be co-opted for the cause. Unfortunately, the attribution theory is simply garbage. We know very well that every bad thing that happens will have been more likely because of climate change, or so the attribution model will say. But even if Melissa’s strong winds were made 5 times more likely due to climate change, then you have to explain why all the storms that didn’t happen were made less likely due to climate change.
The Guardian is now stuck appealing to an audience who want to be fed climate alarm. They do not want to report how lowly the US public ranks the problem of climate change, because their readers do not want to know about things like that. Facts don’t matter. Feelings do.
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Chris,
I agree that the point regarding sample size was a technical aside that does not detract from the main point of Mark’s article. Such polls are taken as evidence of massive support for climate action, when they provide nothing of the sort. Considering the extent to which media outlets such as the Guardian incessantly espouse fear and doom, it is little wonder that, when asked privately, people are prepared to express climate concerns. But as you say, quantifying those concerns in terms of a willingness to make a personal sacrifice reveals a more pertinent truth, as does Mark’s reminder that such concerns consistently rank low when compared to others.
Those who are so concerned regarding climate change that they support programmes such as Net Zero are desperate to convince everyone else that they are actually in a majority, albeit a silent one. So, they have constructed the narrative of pluralistic ignorance, in which everyone is remaining silent about their concerns because they mistakenly think they are in a minority. Articles such as this Guardian effort are all part of creating that narrative. And they have been very successful. It is nigh on impossible to get AI to shift from the position that such pluralistic ignorance is a genuine phenomenon.
However, when asked how this situation of pluralistic ignorance could have arisen, the reasons given are highly dubious. First, there is presupposed to be a fear of being ridiculed if personal climate fears are made public. Secondly, there is presupposed to be a false balance in the media. This is perverse thinking in my opinion. I think ‘deniers’ have a lot more to fear in terms of public disapproval, and I see no sign of a false balance. There is also the view that people look at what others are doing and — construing that their actions betray a lack of climate concern — mistakenly believe that there actually is a lack of concern. But I’m with you, Chris. I don’t think they are making a mistake at all. The best indicator of how people think is what people do, and trying to glean some sort of counter-narrative by torturing the results of polls that use vague and loaded questions is an act of desperation.
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Jit,
I wouldn’t go so far as to say that attribution theory is simply garbage, but I do think it is problematic and it is being wielded as a political weapon, sometimes by scientists who are very open regarding their political motivations. I also fully agree with the statement that there has been a deliberate strategy of focusing upon extreme events appearing in the news, because they have far greater impact than a bunch of model-generated graphs indicating a future demise. It is naked exploitation of the availability heuristic.
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“AI may upend online studies critical to social science”
Science link.
It’s back to the clipboards.
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