Despite the lies of the Times, majority believe climate change is man made.

Yesterday, the The Times online published results of a poll that demonstrates that the overwhelming majority of the British public believe that climate change is man made (anthropogenic). Bizarrely, they chose to mis-represent ("spin") the results with the headline Global warming is not our fault, say most voters in Times poll.

First, I'll fess up. My headline is also spin. The poll didn't ask people if they believe in anthropogenic climate change. It asked if

Climate change is happening . . .
... and is now established as largely man-made 41%
... but not yet proven to be largely man-made 32%
... but it is not environmentalist propaganda that is man-made [sic - I presume this wasn't the question that they really asked] 8%
... Climate change is not happening 15%

But, if my headline is spin, theirs is a downright lie, and here's why:

In their report, they used the phrase "established as a scientific fact". But, what they didn't ask is "what do you believe". So, lets take a look at the more detailed report [pdf], and see what people really said.

First, 83% agreed that climate change is happening ("Earth's climate is changing and climate change taking place?" [sic]). Only 2% had no view.

Second, 80% (96% of 83%) agree that climate change is a serious problem. Now, at this point, the question should not be "Who's fault is it?", but "What can we do about it?". However, I'll grant that the answer to the first question has some bearing on the latter. If it's our fault (in a causal rather than moral sense), then maybe we can tackle the problem by stopping doing the wrong thing. If it's not our fault, then we have to start doing something new. Either way, if 80% of people agree that it's a serious problem, then surely that should be the support that the UK government requires in December.

The Times goes on to say "The high level of scepticism underlines the difficulty the Government will have in persuading the public to accept higher green taxes". But that's also rubbish, as their survey demonstrates. Most people (over 50%) surveyed were in favour of higher taxes to combat climate change: specifically with respect to air travel (57%) and gas guzzlers (68%). Oh, and 87% are in favour of stricter building regulations - something that I'm sure the Times would be happy to describe as a "stealth tax", if (a) they'd thought of it, and (b) it weren't so popular!

And this is where we come to the lie. Remember, they said that most people thing Global Warming is not our fault. Presumably, in "most" they're including all those who say it is "not yet proven", but are these really people who say it's definitely "not our fault"? They can't be - not if they also think that taxing air travel or gas guzzlers is going to help. At best, you can characterise this group as "undecided", but my bet is that it consists of some "believers", some "disbelievers" and all the "undecideds". Frankly, it's a poor question.

Note, the poll shows that support for climate taxes is increasing - though the Times shows it's innumeracy here by somehow claiming that more people oppose increasing the cost of motoring, despite showing that men and women are separately less likely to oppose this measure. As are all age groups, and supporters of all parties (assuming "p8" is a typo for "-8").

This bears repeating: the Times are claiming that most people think that climate change is not caused by humans, while at the same time reporting that most people are happy to see new taxes to stop humans causing climate change!

Brown's half full house

The speaker here is Gordon Brown. Plenty of empty seats, eh?

Why I'd pay for free wi-fi

I've been to a couple of conferences this year, and both times looked for cheap hotels with free wi-fi. In Birmingham, I needed to finish the presentation (on spam email), so I needed wi-fi to research aspects of that presentation. I also used it to find out about local eateries. It all worked smoothly.

In Bournemouth, at the Lib-Dems conference, I used wi-fi for similar purposes, but also wanted to use it to synchronise my laptop calendar with the calendar on my iPhone, using Apple's MobileMe service which normally does this automatically. The conference fringe timetable is complex, with lunchtime and up to three evening slots, and perhaps a dozen events in each slot. All to be fit around meals, and meet-ups.

I booked a hotel with free wi-fi, but they'd overbooked and moved me to another hotel where I had to pay online before using the wi-fi. At £10 for a week, that's not too bad. The problems started when I tried to pay.

Of course, to manage paid wi-fi, the providers have to put up barriers between me and the Internet. And, they want me to pay over the Internet using PayPal. When I came to pay, my browser popped up a security warning. The security certificate wasn't a PayPal certificate.

I phoned the provider, and was told that this happens quite frequently, and not to worry because the network was completely secure. That's simply not true. Trivially, nothing is completely secure, but in this case I was being asked to click through known security inconsistencies, and given no guidance as to which invalid certificates I should accept.

Throw in a couple of timeouts, and it took me about an hour, in all, to get connected.

Worse, once I was connected, pretty much any secure service I wanted to use wouldn't work properly. Either I had to click through a security warning, or - in the case of the calendar sync process - the service simply would not work.

So, that's a tenner completely wasted, and I'd have gladly paid more than a tenner (for the room) to get free wi-fi, without the payment system that made this so hard to use. Oh, and I never did get the wi-fi to operate with my iPhone - I couldn't get past the paywall even though you're supposed to be able to use multiple devices with the one password.

Elevated status

The Sussex Express printed my article today. They've managed to describe me as "a Liberal Democrat county councillor for Priory ward, and a Lewes District Councillor".

In fact, I'm a Liberal Democrat district councillor for Priory ward. I'm not a county councillor at all. Never mind.

Interesting to see that Jason Sugarman chose to use the article to undermine trust, by repeating lies about Norman Baker's expenses.

Anyway, in my article, I said you can read more about the turnout stats on my blog. That's all in this post.

Election algebra

I wrote a piece on trust in major political parties for the Sussex Express. Here's some evidence for a few of the claims that I made about the June 2009 elections.

"The press, and politicians have been worried that loss of trust in politics would mean low election turnouts, or a boost to minor parties."

See, for example, The Guardian

"Neither happened in June"

See graph - note the drop of over a million Labour votes. Other parties exchanged a couple of hundred thousand votes each. That's not to be dismissed, but all the four largest parties here, except Labour, polled better than in 1999. The BNP and Greens did get more votes, and 2 MEPs each, but their total vote numbers weren't enough to qualify as a radical breakthrough.

"the low Labour vote let two BNP members get elected."

Although their vote increased nationally, it actually declined in the two regions where they got elected. It's good to see the BNP vote declining in those areas. The Labour vote was down 180,000 in Yorkshire - 11,000 of those votes would have kept the BNP out there. They lost 240,000 in the North West region, 60,000 of those votes (or 5,000 UKIP or Green votes) would have kept the BNP out there. To be fair, other major parties saw significant drops in these two regions, too.

It would be interesting to try to work out some tactical voting strategies for the Euro elections, but it's much more complex than in First Past the Post. You'd need some pretty accurate polling results in your region to work out where your vote would be best placed to keep out the BNP. The answer is you need to place it with a party that has close to identical support, or close to double or treble the support of the BNP. It's definitely a drawback of the D'Hondt method that you can't express preferences.

These were the BNP votes:

	2004	2009
North West	134,959	132,094
Yorks & Humberside	126,538	120,139

Reasons to be cheerful, part one.

Part 1...

We, the Lib Dems, took Bristol. That's England's seventh largest city.

It's odd, by the way, that Bristol was up for election with all the county councils. That's because, legally, it's defined as a county for the purposes of the Lieutenancies Act 1997. It's our smallest county by area.

Here are the largest cities (source Wikipedia) in England, and who governs them. We have a hand in running all of them except London and Manchester.

• London is run by a Conservative Mayor, held to account by a mixed assembly (Con 11, Lab 8, LD 3, Green 2, Nazi 1) currently chaired by Green Party assembly member Darren Johnson. Liberal Democrats run some of the London Boroughs.
• Birmingham is run by a Conservative and Lib Dem coalition, the deputy leader being Lib Dem cllr Paul Tilsley.
• Liverpool is run by Liberal Democrats, under leader cllr Warren Bradley.
• Leeds city council is run but a coalition of Conservatives, Liberal Democrats and Independents, led by Lib Dem cllr Richard Brett
• Sheffield is run by Liberal Democrats, under leader Paul Scriven
• Manchester is run by Labour (61 seats), with Lib Dems second (34 seats), and the Conservatives holding one seat.
• And, now Bristol is run by Liberal Democrats, with 36 seats (Con 17, Lab 16, Green 1).
• We also run a number of other British cities, like Newcastle, Cambridge, Portsmouth, Edinburgh (with SNP), Cardiff (minority administration), and Swansea (in coalition).

So, our win in Bristol underlines the fact that we're a party of government, and that we're strong in urban areas. And, there are a number of examples of us working in coalition with others. While we don't seem to have any counties, we do have districts and boroughs throughout England.

Election algebra

I got interviewed for the BBC News web site at conference last weekend. I was quoted:

"Maybe they will have to compromise on some things, but I don't think it is necessary to form a coalition. I don't see why the largest party needs to be the one that forms the government.

. Actually, there's some stuff missing in that quote. What I really suggested was that if a coalition is formed, it doesn't need to contain the largest party. I gave the recent elections in Israel as an example, where there was a lot of talk of a coalition forming around the second party.

Anyway, someone was kind enough to email me and call me a cretin, on the basis of that quote. Using phrases like "completely fail to understand the concept of a democracy". Thanks, Iain, perhaps I'll return the favour some day.

"... based on that quote, you do come across as an utter cretin who's unaware they've just proposed something dangerously undemocratic and illiberal that would involve turning back the constitutional clock to the 18th century. "

he says.

But, now that he mentions it, perhaps there are circumstances under which the Queen might reasonably ask the second party to form a government. Indulge me for a moment, and please try not to blow a gasket, Iain.

Suppose, for example, that party A gets 40% of the vote, and 48% of the seats. Party B gets 55% of the vote, and 46% of the seats in parliament. Which party should form the government? What if supporters of party C (with 5% of the vote, and 6% of the seats) clearly express a preference for B over A in opinion polls.

Now, clearly a constitutional crisis (what Iain fears) occurs if party B is asked to form a government. But, in the figures above, I see a crisis occuring even if party A is asked to form the government.