Christopher Pearson, polling as science, and boldly going where scientists fear to tread ...

In the course of the past few years, a number of opinion polls have stunned the political class across the Anglosphere:

Half of all Americans believe they are protected by guardian angels, one-fifth say they've heard God speak to them, one-quarter say they have witnessed miraculous healings, 16 percent say they've received one and 8 percent say they pray in tongues, according to a survey released Thursday by Baylor University.

The wide-ranging survey of 1,648 adults, who were asked 350 questions on their religious practices last fall, reveals a significant majority who are comfortable with the supernatural.

But it's not just guardian angels, working overtime during Hurricane Katrina, that get a guernsey:

The survey, which has a margin of error of four percentage points, also revealed that theological liberals are more apt to believe in the paranormal and the occult - haunted houses, UFOs, communicating with the dead and astrology - than do conservatives. Women (35 percent), blacks (41 percent), those younger than 30 (40 percent), Democrats (40 percent) and singles who are cohabitating (49 percent) were more likely to believe, the survey said.

Baylor researchers also criticized a much-ballyhooed “new atheism” as a barely discernable trend, saying the number of Americans who are atheists has stayed at 4 percent since 1944. (here in the always reliable if flailing failing wretched half assed deluded and half baked The Washington Times).

But don't believe just one survey. Why not read Most Americans Believe in Higher Power, Poll Finds, in The Washington Post, a rag which loves to publish Sarah Palin's innermost thoughts.

Better still why not head off to Pew to read their actual findings. You can get a summary and a pdf of the summary and clicks to lots of other much more detailed goodies by heading here.

But let's cut to the chase:

Belief in the Supernatural. As with belief in life after death, belief in the supernatural is also quite common. Nearly eight-in-ten American adults (79%), for instance, agree that miracles still occur today as in ancient times. But here again, the intensity with which people hold these beliefs varies considerably across religious groups. For instance, eight-in-ten Mormons completely agree that miracles still occur today, as do large majorities of members of evangelical (61%) and historically black (58%) Protestant churches. Members of other religious groups, on the other hand, are less certain, with fewer than half saying they completely agree that miracles still occur today.

Similar patterns exist with respect to beliefs about the existence of angels and demons. Nearly seven-in-ten Americans (68%) believe that angels and demons are active in the world. Majorities of Jehovah’s Witnesses (78%), members of evangelical (61%) and historically black (59%) Protestant churches, and Mormons (59%) are completely convinced of the existence of angels and demons. In stark contrast, majorities of Jews (73%), Buddhists (56%), Hindus (55%) and the unaffiliated (54%) do not believe that angels and demons are active in the world.

Naturally this cultural mix tends to skew responses on key issues:

Yep, a majority of sensible people believe abortion should be legal, and homosexuality is a valid way of life, while fruitloops who believe in all kinds of supernatural oddities skew the results towards the negative.

The same with science:

When in doubt, the last port of call for the supernaturalists is scientific information, or even the more vague notion of 'philosophy and reason'. You have to turn to the atheists to get 20% thinking that science might help with issues of right or wrong, or Buddhists to rustle up 27% who rely most on philosophy and reason.

Yep, bugger scientific information, philosophy or reason in America. And if you're gay in America, head to San Francisco or New York.

But why the interest in Americans and their religious beliefs you ask, ranging as they do from the merely fruitloop to the profoundly bizarre, with these polls just scratching the surface of the many heads protected by aluminium foil from the death rays beaming in from outer space?

Well as usual, it's Christopher Pearson, who thinks polling tells us everything we need to know about anything, and he's wildly excited in A change in the way we think:

In the course of the past week, two opinion polls have stunned the political class across the Anglosphere.

An American CNN-Opinion Research Corporation poll conducted on December 2 and 3 found that people who believe in man-made global warming, 54 per cent last summer, are now in a minority at 45 per cent.

One-third of those who accept there's a global warming trend attribute it to natural causes.

The pollster, Keating Holland, notes similar shifts in surveys during recent months show the results cannot simply be attributed to Climategate, the hacking of the University of East Anglia climate researchers' computer files. He also found that among Republicans the belief in anthropogenic global warming had plummeted by 11 per cent, while it remained steady among Democrats.

The other poll, for Britain's The Sunday Telegraph, found that 46 per cent of respondents believe there is no proof that global warming is man-made. Seven per cent don't accept that the Earth is warming at all and fewer than one in four believe it is "the most serious problem faced by man".

Um, are these the same folk who believe in supernatural wonders? And what does polling people at random tell us about the actual science? As opposed to fruitloop systems of belief?

Never mind, you see there's even more fiendish information to hand:

In the blogosphere, a Google search for Climategate on Thursday last week found about 21 million results. On Thursday this week it registered more than 32 million, despite the fact the politically correct Google team has been blocking the word from its own list of search box suggestions.

Microsoft's search engine, Bing, has no such inhibitions and on Thursday it was registering about 50 million results.

Oh dear. We did that last week too (here). Still if you're going to be unoriginal, then as well as repeating yourself, why not throw in a conspiracy theory about a 'politically correct' Google for good measure. As opposed to the wonderfully incorrect work of Chairman Gates.

Well this week we can report we collected 2,190,000 results for perverted sex, which clearly shows Senator Conroy's filter in action, and only 31,700,000 for oral sex. Which proves that people who google are more interested in climategate than they are in oral sex.

While on Bing, the uninhibited free wheeling Chairman Gates, the search produced 79,400,400 results for oral sex, and 5,290,000 for perverted sex.

Which proves that Bing users are much more interested in perverted and oral sex, because they're not politically correct, while the evil Google refuse to acknowledge the importance of oral sex.

There's a conspiracy at work here.

Yep, stupid people have started to read blogs and develop stupid conspiracy theories. Here's a couple of samples - the conspiracy , which naturally involves Al Gore, and Googlegate, and so on - you can google the talk of the conspiracy for yourself and get plenty of results.

Yep, Google fully documents the news on Google censoring climategate, and delivers 21 million results or whatever for climategate in the process, but it's a conspiracy to block information, I tells ya, and silence the conspiracy theorists. 21 million hits! Got a year to spare to check them all out? You'll need to do a tad better than 57,500 a day.

Dear lord, and Martians took down the twin towers, unless of course it was the US government. But back to Pearson:

However, Climategate has given all but the true believers good grounds for scepticism. There's no point in denying that the leaked emails are a great setback for the cause, as the ABC and the Fairfax press still persist in doing.

As they're discovering to their cost, audiences who feel that the national broadcaster or their metropolitan daily is keeping them in the dark will change channels or change papers.

Many more will visit contrarian blogs such as Andrew Bolt's, which has had its highest volume of traffic in the past month, two million compared with a previous high of 1.3 million.

On the weekend the Climategate story broke, when local media made no mention of it, Bolt had more than eight times normal traffic on the Saturday and a similar figure for the Sunday.

Which is wonderful, tremendous insight into the science and the scientific issues. Or perhaps an indication that a loon like the Dolt has a vast loon pond full of many squawking loons?

Because you see, it's not about the science at all, it's about the numbers, and how many true believers can be swayed from true believing into a different kind of true believing. Yep, it's a variant on the valiant Catholic battle for the very soul of humanity:

It will be fascinating to see how far public opinion in Australia lags behind the trends in the US and Britain and how fast it will change. Morgan polls tell us the percentage of respondents who said concerns over man-made global warming were exaggerated had risen from 13 per cent in 2006 to 27 per cent in August this year.

During the same period the share of people who said "if we don't act now it will be too late" fell from 67 per cent to 58 per cent and the prophets of doom convinced "it's already too late" diminished from 15 per cent to 11 per cent.

Ah, the lord is moving in mysterious ways, but can the filthy secularist atheists in the wrong camp be swayed to a belief in the Lord?

Another aspect of future polling on the issue, which the political class will be keen to read, is the way that voting intentions break down among believers, sceptics and others. Will Australian opinion follow the US trend, with belief among Labor supporters staying steady and most who move into the sceptics' camp or describe themselves as undecided being habitual Coalition supporters?

Yes, they can. Anyone who shops at Chadstone mall knows that truth:

Perhaps, although the marked drift of blue-collar workers who voted for Liberal candidates rather than Greens at last Saturday's by-elections suggests that Kevin Rudd may not be able to count on retaining his present share of "the Howard battlers" next time and that there may be more than enough of them to offset defections by the "doctors' wives".

Bugger me dead, Christopher Pearson reads Glenn Milne. Or is there just a general conservative commentariat meme which imprints a sign reading "genetically goosey" on the forehead as we talk of doctors' wives and Howard's battlers? In Toorak and Bradfield.

Even before the opinion polling is done, I think we can be sure of a few things.

The deluge of calls and emails on the emissions trading scheme in federal Coalition MPs' offices represented a substantial change of sentiment within the base of both the Liberal and National parties. Although it had been building up since well before Climategate, the hacked emails gave dissent a much sharper focus.

Ah well, so much for Paul Colgan's revelations in The holy war on climate change that hardline conservative Christians and the likes of Cory Bernardi had a hand in the deluge of calls and emails. That piece of fluffery disappeared quicker than a snowball in the middle of a desert experiencing climate change.

Now once again, before we forget what we're on about, let's get down to brass tacks, let's get the hands dirty, let's talk about the scientific issues:

The number of true believers has already peaked and any movement will be into the sceptics' and the undecideds' columns.

The sense of resentment at having been taken for a ride -- by the climate scientists, the media and politicians on all sides -- will be widespread and deep-seated.

WTF? Science is just a matter of polling and a sense of resentment? It's just a political campaign? In the eyes of Christopher Pearson, it surely is:

I can't resist drawing a parallel with the republican referendum. Public opinion, the media and the commentariat made a yes vote seem inevitable. But when the Keating-Turnbull model came under sustained scrutiny, clear majorities in all six states concluded that it was a dud.

Oh yes, a dud that will see the talking tampon as Christopher Pearson's king in due course, rabbiting on about climate change. Oh such sweet days to come, but in the meantime, here's Chuck's latest pronouncement in Newsweek, under the header Act Now on Global Climate Change:

As the world edged into financial crisis, there were repeated warnings that we were headed for disaster. In the end, disaster struck. In many ways, the challenge of climate change has a similar feel, and the alarm bells are ringing just as loudly. But while it was possible to bail out the banks and to stimulate economic recovery with trillions of dollars of public finance, it will not be possible to bail out the climate—unless we act now ...

.. Yet even when the basic science of climate change has been accepted by almost all scientists, many others still seem to think that it is unfounded, and that the world has more important questions to address. Reducing poverty, increasing food production, combating terrorism, and sustaining economic recovery are seen as more deserving of our attention. But this is a false choice, for climate change is not an alternative priority to all of these; it is in fact a "risk multiplier," a factor that will undermine our ability to achieve any of these things.

Go for it Chuck, you give those monarchist anti-republicans what for:

These environmental stresses are likely to heighten social tensions. If in the future it becomes clear that the world's big polluters knew but did little or nothing about these problems, a whole new generation of resentment might be born.

With this in mind, it seems to me that we need to adopt a new approach. Surely the starting point must be to see the world as it really is, and perhaps to accept that the economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of Nature and not the other way around. Nature is, after all, the capital that underpins capitalism. The world's tropical rainforests provide a powerful case in point.

But enough of the talking tampon who will soon enough be foisted on us by the likes of the Abbott and Pearson and Flint monarchist camp.

Back to Pearson, who, after establishing that polling is the one true science, spends the rest of his column praising Tony Abbott and his far sighted 'climate change is crap' vision:

In some quarters he's blamed for inconsistency, in having more than one position, as though it betokened unsteadiness or not knowing his own mind.

But most swinging voters won't hold that against him because they understand it takes courage to change your mind.

It would have been far easier for him to air private reservations and toe the party line, rather than to force his colleagues to keep faith with the party's base and shatter a faux-consensus.

Oh yes, in much the same way as Barnaby Joyce is shattering a faux-consensus, by warning us all that the end of the financial world is at hand, unless we get taken over by China within the next year, in which case we'll all be wearing Chairman Mao suits. (So, now it's back to the future with Barnaby Joyce? Golly, even The Australian editorialists are worried!)

Never mind. For now just relax, and forget the science, and focus on the scientific polling:

The sea change in public opinion on global warming during the past 18 months has been unusually testing for our political leaders and in another 18 months I doubt many of them will be judged to have met the test.

And remember to throw in some indignation:

Telling us that "delay is denial" and calling people who disagree with them deniers or denialists -- with all the Holocaust resonances of both words -- is choosing thuggery instead of civil argument.

Yep, so much more civil than climate change is crap, because it's all bullshit.

Meanwhile citizens, dance in the streets, a rampant Abbott is on the move:

Repeated refusal of his challenge to debate the scheme outside his comfort zone in parliament would leave Rudd looking arrogant to some voters and, perhaps for the first time, vulnerable to others.

Phew. Chairman Rudd vulnerable. What a tremendous relief.

And we got through the entire column without once discussing the science in any meaningful way, but what a pleasant detour through the belief systems of the average American, and the google conspiracy theorists, and naturally as with most fairy stories, the villains defeated, and all well with the world.

Oh sure there will be a few whingers and sceptics and deniers who reel away clutching their heads and moaning how they've lost zillions of brain cells, and their head hurts and they need an aspirin and a lie down, but that's the kind of befuddled thinking you expect from theologians and scientists, those true believers who refuse to discuss scientific polling rationally.

Now finally, for my poll on whether Einstein's theory of relativity is correct, I've asked a sample of fifteen year old school girls - in the approved Janet Albrechtsen way - and it seems that sixty per cent of them think it's unproven, twenty per cent think that it still needs to be reconciled with the laws of quantum physics and five per cent hold out for string theory, a few gooses said they didn't know - they've done their science in NSW schools - while one totally useless respondent wrote a paper on spacetime singularities and the need for a new physics to account for dark energy, dark matter, and the so-called Pioneer anomaly, and foolishly attached powerful computer simulations of natural events such as merging black holes (here).

She was immediately discounted for being a smart arse and wiki cheat, and by general agreement and public consensus, Einstein's theory is deemed to be no longer valid.

So scientific history is made, as we boldly go with Pearson where no man has gone before.

Science ... the final frontier.

These are the voyages of the Starship Pearson.

Its continuing mission:

To explore strange new worlds ...

To seek out enlightening polls; new civilizations of true believers

To boldly go where no one has gone before!

(Below: William Shatner, who once was Captain Kirk, and Christopher Pearson, who's taken over his mission).