Richard North at EUReferendum has a pop at the EU's pathetic attempts to overstate people's concerns about MMGW. I think that even he has missed the point. The results as shown on page 6 of the final report are as follows:
As you will notice, the first column adds up to 313%, because people were allowed to give multiple answers. So I have added an extra column showing the true percentage, which knocks 'Global warming/climate change' (a bit vague there!) down to 20%.
The whole thing is a farce anyway, take worries about 'overpopulation' and 'starvation', for example. Either you think there is plenty of food and water, but you'd like to restrict the number of people, or you think that there isn't enough food and water in which case you can't be worried about overpopulation as the world's population has reached its natural upper limit. Or in my case you're not worried about either. Starvation is for the most part caused by bad government - because they have bad agricultural or trade policies or because they engage in endless warfare. And I really don't mind how many or few children people want to have, as long as they can look after them properly without handouts.
The original questionnaire allowed respondents to suggest something that was not on the list.
My number one concern (not on the list, obviously) would have been Big Government, which probably causes most of the other things on the list. The bigger a government is, the more taxes it collects, the more it interferes in the economy and agriculture, the more authoritarian it gets (and an authoritarian government spends half its time busily whipping up a Climate Of Fear, be that of terrorism, bad weather, overpopulation, you name it), all of this to the overall detriment of 99% of the world's population.
Blow that whistle
3 hours ago
4 comments:
That's such a flawed study. You can't take a set of unordered preferences and then apply order from them, which is what the EU have done.
For all we know, 100% of people's first choice was poverty, or it may be that the first choices were 80% poverty, 10% terrorism, 10% war. It may be that 62% of people are more worried about a freak event like an asteroid hitting the earth. We simply don't know.
If a survey company walked into a marketing department of a large corporation with that survey methodology and that result they'd be fired for either being crooked or incompetent.
From personal experience climate change alarmism isn't actually changing people's behaviour significantly; political policies which use it as a flag of convenience are having far more impact. I think propaganda like this is actually going to have a negative impact in today's cynical world, it's not sophisticated enough for an audience that expects crude fictions from political organisations.
Why weren't punters allowed to choose "Immigration", "EU expansion eastwards" or the "EU" as their biggest fears!?!
T, exactly.
MJW, I'm still waiting for the backlash.
S, there was an 'Other' option, heck knows how many mentioned the things that you did. They'd have been items 2, 3 and 4 on my list.
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