Carbon Emissions

Unless you've been living under some sort of rock (hopefully a comfortable one) for the past few days then you should have heard about the governments cuffuful (pronunciation: ka-fa-full) over their global warming plan for the next few years. All in all they haven't done a very good job of spruking it to the general public, as Tony Windsor was discussing the other night on lateline they've provided a framework for a carbon tax but have left a lot of empty spaces where the opposition can fill in the blanks with whatever they want to destroy the plan and thus the government. So although they might have a good framework for some action against Global Warming it's getting kicked to pieces, along with their credibility.

What I do love is that currently the biggest destruction** Global Warming has caused is the careers of 2 Australian prime ministers. One who announced his action plan against climate change and was promptly backstabbed from his own party and the second who currently has taken an 11 point beating in the polls and if she doesn't recover it quickly could face the same fate as her predecessor (although unlikely it sure would be fun!)

For an avid liberal it's great fun watching the Labor party squirm but thats not what I want to discuss.

Opinion Polls - What I really don't understand with these huge swings in polls is that either some people are just really indecisive and change their mind at the slightest new legislation or there's something wrong with the way we poll people. Now sure over a controversial piece of legislation some people might choose to vote for the opposing party if they disagree, but 11%?!? Lets say that a mere 66% of the public are voting adults then this 11% swing would correspond to 2 million people. How could that many people change their minds over just a framework of a carbon tax, it hasn't even been debated on the house's floor yet! Lets see where thing is going people!

How do we poll people anyway? Do we call maybe a couple of thousand people, ask them how they vote and tally it up against last months results? So say the pollers choose by chance a really pro-liberal group, could that cause a huge swing towards the liberals or do they have guards against that? Does anyone really take polls seriously when being polled?!? If we took two polls at the exact same time could we get two completely different results? Hopefully not, but maybe it's worth looking in to...

Anyway hopefully someone has the answer and I can sleep better at night.

See you next time, and don't forget to leave me a comment!

Petey

*N.B - In no way am against global warming being real, in fact I think it is a huge threat to the planet and we really should do something about it, and it may well have had already caused bigger destructions than peoples careers but it's not as evident yet.