On June 9, I wrote:
Obviously different subsets of the population. I'm guessing the first group are Federal government employees and college students studying political science... although even the Rasmussen poll shows more people once again believing in human activity as the primary cause of global warming [which may or may not be occurring].The issue was the widely disparate results of a Stanford poll showing most people believe in man-made global warming when nearly all other polls showed the direct opposite result. The timing of the poll... just before Congress and the President were making another push for global warming legislation that would cost the economy billions, maybe trillions, of dollars... left the poll suspect in my mind.
Now the head of Pew Research and The Gallup Poll have basically said that the Stanford survey was horribly designed and the questions simply led people to answer in a way that neutral questions would not. [h/t Marc Morano at climatedepot.com]
I'm not a big fan of polls as the arbiters of truth.
Polls show popular sentiment which is politically important, but do not measure scientific merit. When the polls showed an overwhelming sentiment that human actions were causing global warming, my reaction was "What does the data say?" The data said that the people were mistaken.Now that the polls' results show agreement with the data, my response is, "That's nice."