310,000 people are wrong and Bob Tisdale is right?

Last weekend, all around the world people gathered to urge action on climate. In New York City the gathering was estimated at 310,000. You can read more in the New York Times, where it got a front page spread.

The climate action rallies got under the skin of WUWT. So far there have been five different articles about them.

Today at wattsupwiththat, Perennially Puzzled "Bob Tisdale" decides that all these hundreds of thousands of people have their priorities skewed. Why? Because he looked up a UN survey.

Bob's headline was like something from The Onion:

More Than 310 Thousand People with Skewed Priorities Flood New York

Front-lines communities are out front at the NYC #PeopleClimate March pic.twitter.com/WuwBCJSHRH
— TckTckTck (@tcktcktck) September 21, 2014

From the UN My World survey, which Bob referred to, the top priority worldwide is education followed by health care. Which is to be expected. They'd rank way up high everywhere, thongh not always at the top. But if they are almost always in the top six, then worldwide you'd expect them to be the top two.

To explain further, you are not asked to rank the items in order. You are only asked to select your top six priorities. So the ranking indicates the priorities most often selected.

Now I can understand science deniers would benefit from an education. Theirs is sadly lacking. At least Bob is well-enough educated that he was able to take a screen grab of the UN survey results so far.

You can see the results here. As Bob showed, looking at the results for the whole world, all ages, all sexes, all education levels - climate change rates lowest after a heap of other things.

I delved into the survey a bit. There were some surprises. Given Bob was telling 310,000 people who gathered in New York City that they had their priorities skewed (he didn't complain about the other 2,000 or so gatherings world wide), I figured I'd look to see how important climate change is to people from the USA.

• Combining all ages, sexes, and level of education climate change ranks 10 out of 16 (n=52,788).
• For women of all ages and levels of education it ranks it ranks 10 out of 16 (n=33,472).
• But for men it ranks slightly higher at 9 out of 16 (n=19,316).

What was more interesting was that for both men and women over 61 climate change ranks 5 out of 16. That was from 6,729 respondents. Quite a lot.  It ranked higher for older respondents than for any other age group.

Curious, eh?

I checked out Australia, too. For all respondents, all ages, both sexes, all education levels there were 21,738 responses. Climate change ranked 7th out of 16 priorities overall.

The segment that was most concerned about climate change in Australia were women aged between 46 and 60, who ranked it fourth out of sixteen. Men aged between 16 and 45 all rated it sixth out of 16.

Bob's urging WUWT deniers to get in there and skew the numbers more deniers' way. It will be interesting to see if he succeeds. If you want to join in too, you can take the survey here.

I reckon in about forty years' time, if WUWT is still around, the headline will read something like:

More Than Nine Billion People with Skewed Priorities Flood the World's Cities

You can have your say about "My World": http://vote.myworld2015.org/v54200b72

From the WUWT comments

Eric Worrall  sniggers like an insecure teenager showing off in front of his under-achieving mates and writes:

September 22, 2014 at 1:57 am
Hilarious – from those poll numbers, pretty much everyone who ticked the “environment” box was at the march.

Gregory points out the link with that evil of evils, long term sustainability:

September 22, 2014 at 2:40 am
Bob, every one of these topics is an Agenda21 action item.

Mario Martini is one of the most realistic commenters, but betrays himself as a science denier when he writes:

September 22, 2014 at 2:51 am
I suspect the impact of yesterday will be greater than any of us would like.

Richard is an ice-age comether. He probably reckons those handful of scientific papers in the 1970s were right and the vast majority wrong. He's still waiting.. He's endlessly patient.  Can he wait 50,000 years?

September 22, 2014 at 3:30 am
If solar scientists are right, and earth’s climate cools for the next few decades, these people will still be protesting. They won’t let facts get in the way of their beliefs.

Johanus reckons it wasn't a spontaneous eruption. It must have been planned. Duh!  You can't fool Johanus:

September 22, 2014 at 3:48 am
“…paid to protest…”
The point is that this is not just a spontaneous gathering of people. I suspect that someone with considerable “community organizing” skill is behind it all, getting all these “folks” to show up and get so hyped up about impending CO2-induced catastrophes, when getting hyped up about ISIS and other impending global security threats would make more sense.

Jonny Old Boy decides the crowd should have been gathering on something else:

September 22, 2014 at 3:52 am
funny how these people do not march to demand a control on world population ,,, 6 Billion a decade ago just turned into 7 billion ,,, when are people that ‘care about the planet’ going to wake up to this disaster we are walking into as a species…..