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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » UKIP slumps 4 points with ComRes online while LAB extends lead to 9 with Opinium
“Please indicate whether you have a favourable or unfavourable view of each of the following political leaders and parties…” Percentage saying “favourable” (change since last month, or *change since June 2013).
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I'd probably rank them something like this:
1. ICM
2. IPSOS-Mori
3. ComRes
4. YouGov
5. Populus
6. Opinium
879. Angus Reid
Is that reasonable/am I missing anyone important?*
* (Survation is neither reasonable nor important)
I come on here and read all this David Cameron/posh business and I just have to laugh .
Maybe ireland should export Dr. James Reilly and Joan Burton to the uk!
The weather isn't good, Salthill is taking a big hit.
UKIP slump four points, probably the most pathetic header I have ever seen on here.
If straw clutching was an Olympic sport Mike would be GB captain.
My ratings are similar to you Charles though I'd distinguish between ComRes phone, which has a track record, and ComRes online which has yet to do a general election.
I quite like Survation and Opinium are moving up on my chart.
It prevents data overload.
I HATE Clegg.
The press association produced a graphic for the 2013 elections, I'm assuming they cribbed it from somewhere.
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2013/04/29/article-0-195D148D000005DC-400_634x449.jpg
We all know Mike doesn't like UKIP but I reckon you will find there are more thread headers highlighting UKIP increases than there are with UKIP drops. Just because that is what has been happening to the UKIP vote generally.
FPT: Mr. G, I was referring to the stated SNP desire to single out England, Wales and Northern Ireland for tuition fees, in the event of independence. That clearly involves anti-English discrimination.
"48% tell ComRes that recent floods have made them more convinced that human-made climate change is happening. Disagree 30%"
ugh
never mind, sensible people can use the pro-cult momentum the telly has generated via the floods by deflecting it into demand for more flood and sea defenses. this will be useful in itself and the cult will hate it because they want punishment not mitigation.
It's also worth remarking that the media (broadcast) have generally parroted, without questioning, the line the pro-warmers (as it were) have stated.
For example, Sky's 'science' correspondent stated that we've seen a pattern emerging regarding storms lately (unarguable). But then he asserted this 'must' be due to man-made climate change. No reference was made to very turbulent periods in the past (even in recorded history, which is a very limited part of the planet's time), nor the wild changes in climate we've seen during the existence of mankind. There was also no direct link asserted, let alone proven, between the current remarkable weather and global warming.
It was simply:
Very bad weather = proof of global warming
It may as well have been:
Very bad weather = proof the gods are angry
The line about 'this is the sort of weather we'd expect to happen more often due to climate change' is also somewhat disingenuous (I believe someone here posted a link, which I don't have to hand, from around 2004 when the scientists predicted rainfall would become far scarcer). It's reminiscent of the snow line:
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/snowfalls-are-now-just-a-thing-of-the-past-724017.html
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/seanthomas/100222487/when-it-comes-to-climate-change-we-have-to-trust-our-scientists-because-they-know-lots-of-big-scary-words/
I'm not saying the media should espouse scepticism, merely give an approximately even-handed account instead of repeating one side's view only.
Oh, and whilst I'm rambling, anybody who talks about a scientific consensus or a majority of scientists being on one side needs a slap. Science isn't a popularity contest and it isn't a democracy. If 1 person disagrees and that 1 person is right, he wins and the other 99.9999% can eat their theories. Science is about facts, reasoning, theories and proving things right and wrong.
Secondly, you're mixing science with media interpretation of science. Popularity doesn't mean science is right. But if to take your example 99% of scientists say one side and 1% say the other then media outlets are very reasonable taking the 99% a lot more seriously, so slap yourself.
Thirdly, if you're talking of bad language use, it should be inarguable.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-26205515
The question is likely to have been More Convinced, Less Convinced, About The Same.
As I don't believe that man-made climate change is happening at all, I can't tick "Less Convinced". Technically I must choose "About The Same" which makes me sound, for want of a better term, wet.
Also, you understood my meaning clearly. The 'more convinced' line is a problem because it's unclear.
The warming scientists got their fourth (I believe) IPCC report wrong, then at the most recent (fifth) declared they were more sure than ever (90% improved to 95%) that they were right. It's deranged. A competent media might point out this glaring absurdity.
Anyway, I am off for supper.
If we have a warm, dry spell in March all of the current hysteria will quickly abate, LOL!
Funny how we didn't get all of this during the recent run of cold winters. It's like they've been storing it up for the first mild/wet winter that comes along.
However I'm sure you regard yourself as an honest man and possessed of integrity. So you're doubtless concerned that the pro-AGW lobby have been hiding data and destroying emails and "hiding the decline" to use their own phrase.
Now if all of that funding money and government patronage was deserved then they wouldn't need to do that. And they wouldn't need to persecute non-believers. You don't need to be a scientist to see that AGW doth protest too much.
As with all science it is open to all researchers and there are very competent physical scientists pursuing quite complicated computer models that try to account for many more influences than I have seen mentioned here. No expert (the realization of which is step one of the process) I understand that a single run may take two or three months of run time.
This website is informative:
http://www.bristol.ac.uk/geography/people/tamsin-l-edwards/index.html
We know quantum theory is probably accurate because we can use computer models to predict what is going to happen and the real world matches our expectations
We know AGW theory is probably accurate because we can use computer models to predict what is going to happen and the real world matches our expectations. Oh wait....forgot it doesn't match the models in the least.
http://csep10.phys.utk.edu/astr161/lect/time/precession.html
On climate change, I am sure mankind is not helping but we know there have been periods of warming and cooling every few hundred years. Let's face it, if any of the major volcanoes go up, never mind a super-volcano, we wont have to worry about global warming! Toba almost wiped out mankind 80,000 years ago. Every time a major eruption occurs in Indonesia we have to hope its not the big one.
Yes, but also Macmillan was (apart from the very special case of Maggie) the greatest PM of the post-war years.
It's a small sample, though - I'm not sure you can assume that, just because Macmillan and Cameron have been so good, that therefore we should actively seek out Old Etonians to run the country.
I owe a genuine thankyou to Hugh and ManchesterKurt for the other night's discussion on AGW.
I have written so many papers and reports for private companies over the last 25 years on various aspects of geology, geo-morphology and palaeo-environment models that I have literally forgotten how many I have done. Most end up in company records and larger reports, the vast majority never published with just a few making it through into the public domain, usually only fragmentary in specialist journals or reports.
So after the comments the other night about the lack of published work I decided that it was time I did something about it. I have always had an absolute love of both learning and pure research and so had a chat with a friend who is a professor of archaeology and he has put me on the road to applying to do my PhD. I am not sure yet how my wife feels about it given the number of calls already on my time but I figure that if I don't do it now I will regret it. I suspect it is a classic mid life crisis and it is either this or buy a Harley
So thanks to PB I am hopefully going to start my doctorate in 2015.... if anyone will have me :-)
So be warned. In a few years time if anyone asks me if I have any peer reviewed papers... well I will probably still have to say no :-)
The keen observer will also note that over the last ten years or so we have variously been told "Our kids will never see snow, cos AGW will leave the UK an arid desert" (that was a warm winter), that we should expect more extreme cold and snow cos of AGW (because it was a cold winter, the coldest since 1987 or something), that summers will be damp, wet and miserable because of AGW (that was after the wettest one for X years, that the land will dry out and water will become a rare resource in the Uk because of AGW (that was a dry summer).
The cynical mind might conclude from this that climate scientists know very little, and the journalists who report on them know even less, but they are all very sure we are doomed because of it...
On UKIP this may be a blip but the timing is not particularly opportune as things start to wind up for the Euros. Not a bad result for them in the by election though so probably too early to say.
I know we have rather talked it to death in the last few days and I am at least partly responsible for that but I did expect to see some new polling on the Scottish referendum in the papers tomorrow. It would be interesting to see if the last poll showing a MOE swing to no was an aberration or if the trend for narrowing is slowing or stopped.
[I won't try to discourage you by telling the stories behind my peer-reviewed papers in very prestigious scientific journals when I was doing my doctorate years ago...]
Take fossil fuel burning. It took millions of years for these carbon energy reserves to accumulate. Coal, oil, natural gas etc. Yet in two hundred years we have been burning them.
The burning of stored energy at this rate has not happened in the earth's history before.
So eventually I went to my supervisor, and asked him to help me find out what I was doing wrong. He went through it, and came to the same answer as me.
It so happened that there was a visiting professor from a well-known US university who was an expert in the field, so we went to him and showed him our workings, still assuming we must both have made a mistake. He went through it, and agreed with me and my supervisor. The original paper seemed to be wrong.
By this time we were getting quite excited. We drafted a joint paper, politely but pointedly arguing that the standard scientific consensus must be wrong on this particular calculation.
Unfortunately it wasn't the great scientific breakthrough that we thought. The professor went back to the US, and got one his post-grad students to go through the whole thing again. It turned out that all three of us had made the same silly mistake - a wrong sign on one of the hundreds of terms in this 20 pages of calculation!
The amusing thing was what happened next. Loathe to miss out on the opportunity of getting a peer-reviewed paper to count towards the Brownie points which scientists have to get, we re-jigged the paper to correct the mistake, basically now saying that we had discovered nothing interesting other than the fact that the other guys had got their sums right. We got this non-paper published in Physical Review Letters, at that time the most prestigious journal in the field. I couldn't help feeling that a silly mistake by me didn't really constitute a major scientific advance!
Congrats to Nigel4England for saying he was mistaken - always something that's difficult to do, but enhances the forum when anyone does.
Why did floods agency spend hundreds on 'equali-tea' gay awareness mugs... and £30,000 on gay pride marches? As Britain counts cost of shoddy defences, we reveal bizarre spending by quango bosses
Investigation shows the Environment Agency, headed by Lord Chris Smith - Britain's first openly gay Cabinet Minister - spent £639 on gay rights mugs
EA also spent £30,000 sponsoring Birmingham's Gay Pride festival in 2009
Comes as EA faces growing criticism of its handling of the flooding crisis
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2560300/Why-did-floods-agency-spend-hundreds-equali-tea-gay-awareness-mugs-30-000-gay-pride-marches-As-Britain-counts-cost-shoddy-defences-reveal-bizarre-spending-quango-bosses.html
I do however have a problem with government agencies spending money outside their remit such as on parades or festivals of any kind.
Edit: By my calculation if, as we are told, there are 11,000 EA employees then that works out at just under 6p per person for mugs. Maybe we should get the EA to run all the rest of our office spending as that is a bloody good deal. :-)
David Cameron’s appearances in flood zones appear to have had some effect, with a slight increase to 29% in those who think he has handled the situation well, but a majority (60%) still believe he has done badly.
On the flooding: 27% blame the government (up 10 points from a fortnight ago), 23% the Environment Agency (down five), while 41% say the cause is freak weather and nothing could have been done (down eight).
I actually agree with the general scientific consensus that humanity has an effect on the climate. To go from there to prioritising 'climate change' as a Gov't objective above energy affordability and security is where I draw the line.
Where I am not convinced is whether it is the major component.
Even if it is the major component I remain unconvinced by the AGW assessment of what needs to happen on the grounds that it costs a huge amount for an outcome that may never occur (their models predictions leave me thinking they are guessing frankly) or if it does occur that the meagre cuts they believe their measures will effect will actually make the difference between survival of the race or not.
I am however convinced that enacting their measures would cause immense poverty and misery amongst those least able to cope under current circumstances.
If you were creating civilization from scratch you might not be too worried whether you built it at the current temperatures or current temperatures + x, but as it is we have a huge amount of infrastructure designed for the current climate, or something like it. Changing everything around to deal with a significant change to it is an unbelievably expensive undertaking.
Last Sunday night their coverage got lower ratings than The Walking Dead, which is a cable show.
The Wall Street Journal did an analysis of their prime time (recorded), and late night (live) coverage on Tuesday Feb 11th. This is what they found -
Commercials - 33.1%
Breaks in action - 26.8%
Action - 24.4%
Replays - 9.3%
Studio - 4.1%
Athlete interviews - 2.3%
Here's the WSJ article...
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304703804579383152207344072?KEYWORDS=nbc+olympics
I.e. that even if we were to stop throwing greenhouses gasses into the air, that the climate would remain static and extreme weather patterns not change. History show us all too well that they do change, for reasons we do not fully understand.
Therefore it makes sense to make our habitations more robust against such extremes anyway, especially in the long term. Imagine how London would have to change if we had another little ice age and more frost fairs, just as one example.
There seems to be a rather stupid assumption by some people that climate change is caused by man, rather than man contributing to climate change.
As an example: many places in Britain are subject to coastal flooding because of coastal retreat, which has been happening since the last ice age, and glacial isostasy in the south. Coastal towns and cities need protection anyway, regardless of AGW.
I'm firmly in the reduce-carbon-emission-where-we-can-cheaply-but-concentrate-on-mitigation camp. I guess that makes me a heretic. ;-)
The size of the effects do not matter because there is a threat anyway. For instance, here in the UK the effect of glacial rebound means that many parts of the south, and especially the southeast, are threatened by sea level rise (or actually land descent). Protection is needed anyway, and the same goes for areas of (say) the east coast, where the glacial till is very susceptible to the sea.
Spending billions on reducing carbon emissions whilst not hardening our infrastructure is absolute lunacy. And hardening our infrastructure can protect us from many different dangers, not just changes in the climate.
Modern life is very fragile: a flood three hundred years ago would just lead homeowners having to dry the place out afterwards. A flood nowadays leads to all sorts of work needed doing, as well as ruined appliances and carpets. It may cost less lives, but the economic cost is so much greater.
The solution is to harden our modern facilities and utilities.