Morgan recently released a new poll on their global warming beliefs and CPRS approval series that they’ve been running regularly of late. These polls are phone polls with relatively small sample sizes running between the late 500’s and a 1000 or so, making the MoE’s on them max out between 3 and 5%. As a result of the small headline samples, and even smaller sub-samples on the cross-tabs, it’s worth stating that the trends in the charts below (apart from the two headline charts) are indicative only.

First up, we’ll go through public opinion on generic global warming. Morgan asks:

Which of the following is closest to your view about Global Warming?

First up, the headline result comes in like this (click to expand):

gwtotal

What we see is a longer term trend away from “If we don’t act now it will be too late” and a slow, incremental growth in the “Concerns are exaggerated” responses – although both appear to have stabilised over recent months. The undecideds and “It’s already too late” crowd  appear to be fairly stable over the long term in their size.

We can also hit the cross-tabs and look at the responses by party vote as well as by gender and geography. First up, responses by Party Vote (ALP, Coalition, Green):

gwalp .     gwcoalition .   gwgreens

Next, responses by gender and geography (Men, Women, Capital Cities and Non-capital cities):

gwmen .  gwwomen

gwcaps .  gwnoncaps

Rather than look at some of the dynamics here in isolation, like the growing partisan divide and the huge gender split, the same dymanics we see with generic global warming are also manifest in views on the CPRS legislation. The headline CPRS numbers come in:

cprstotal

Now the cross-tabs on party vote (ALP, Coalition, Green):

cprsalp .  cprscoalition . cprsgreens

Now by gender and geography (Men, Women, Capitals and Non-capitals)

cprsmen . cprswomen .

cprscaps . cprsnoncaps

The really big stand outs here are the increasing partisan divide not only on the CPRS legislation – which is probably to be expected – but also in generic views about global warming. The other is the pretty significant difference between men and women on each issue – a difference well, well beyond any margin of error involved in the polling.

Capital City/Regional differences exist as well, but are larger on the CPRS  than generic global warming.

There’s something in this for both sides of politics. The demographic cross-tabs must be a worry for the Coalition, putting Abbott and the LNP on the wrong side of a plurality of women voters on yet another issue, as well as being on the wrong side of metropolitan majority opinion (you cant win government without winning the cities). But it’s not all bad for Abbott –  Barking in comments in the Newspoll thread made a good point that’s worth repeating:

I have nothing to base this on other than gut feeling, and I’m sure its only an element of what is going on however. The Global Warming issue is not a good one for the ALP, those who think more should be done are moving to the Greens, those blue collar ‘howards battlers’ who read Bolt will move to others, etc because they think that we shouldn’t do anything. There is a bit of a squeeze here and I’m not sure how the ALP can run it.

The CRPS headline chart certainly supports the notion.

On other matters, I’ve emptied the Idiot Bin. For those that were stuck in it, abide by the simple moderation rules of Pollytics and you’ll be fine.

UPDATE:

Adam in comments asked about age breakdowns on the questions. Since the sample sizes here are small, the results are indicative only. First up, on the generic global warming questions:

scepticage actnowage

Then we have the CPRS approval responses:

cprsapproveage cprsdisapproveage