Four out of five Australians believe that climate change is happening, but those who do not are much more likely to vote for the Coalition, new analysis of existing CSIRO data has found.
The peak scientific research body analysed data from its past five climate change surveys to give a comprehensive look at how the public’s attitudes have changed over time. The survey was axed this year, so the figures cover the period 2010 to 2014.
The research found that 78% of Australians believed that climate change was happening.
In 2014, less than two in five – 39% – thought that climate change was happening but was naturally induced. Another 46% nominated humans as the main cause of environmental changes. In 2010, 50% said they believed that climate change was human-induced.
Greens and Labor voters were the most likely to believe that climate change was human induced – 76% and 59% respectively. Coalition supporters were much less likely to believe that climate change existed, with 13% of Liberal voters and 18% of Nationals voters saying that they did not think climate change was happening.
Most Liberal voters (52%) said they believed that climate change was happening but was naturally-occurring – 28% said they thought it was human-induced. By contrast, 31% of Labor supporters said climate change was naturally-occurring, and 59% said it was human-induced.
But one of the report’s authors, Zoe Leviston, urged caution in reading too much into the correlation between voting habits and climate outlook, saying a person’s opinion on humans’ impact on the planet was much more relevant.
“You can see that there are patterns between people’s political orientation, even patterns in who people vote for and how they respond to climate change,” Leviston told ABC Radio on Wednesday. “But if you look at things like deep-seated world-views, that human-nature interaction, that accounts for that variability we see in those more surface order things like political orientation.”
“I think it’s an oversimplification to say it’s driven by political leanings,” she said. “It was quite interesting to see that things like income, age, gender really didn’t have a noticeable impact on both what people thought about climate change and what they were doing in response to climate change.”
Leviston noted that there was a change in the individual respondents’ opinions over the five-year period, but that there was little overall shift in national views.
“If we look at more of an individual level, we can track the people who completed the surveys again and again over the five-year, or the four-year period and we find quite a lot of fluctuation in people’s opinions,” she said. “And I think what this suggests to us is that actually a lot of people talk about people’s beliefs about climate change – we wouldn’t expect to see that sort of volatility in individual responses if they were deep-seated beliefs.”
“So to me it suggests that people’s attitudes towards climate change are more opinions that are responsive to changes in the social environment and also possibly the physical environment, and that fluctuation reflects quite subtle changes in an individual level environment.
Across the five years of the survey, 2011 was the year in which the most people – 25.3% – believed that climate change was not happening.
That was also the year that then prime minister, Julia Gillard, introduced the carbon tax, prompting some public protest, including the infamous rally in which then opposition leader, Tony Abbott, stood in front a sign depicting Gillard as a witch.
