Activist groups GetUp! and Say Yes Australia have taken an interest in The Sunday Age‘s Climate Agenda poll, boosting the votes for questions which regard climate change as a real threat.
The response comes after prominent sceptic Andrew Bolt encouraged his blog readers vote to vote, leading to a spike for questions with a sceptical slant.
The Sunday Age has teamed up with startup group Oursay.org to invite the public to identify the top 10 unanswered questions about climate change. The newspaper is committed to reporting 10 that receive the most votes.
Gautam Raju, a board member of OurSay.org, said the newspaper’s Climate Agenda had prompted an ”incredible debate” on the site.
‘We’ve got organisations and individuals running campaigns in their houses, through their mailing lists, through their Facebook, through their social media - it’s incredible and something that we’re really excited about,” Mr Raju said.
”This is what it’s about. If you can run a campaign and get people involved, that’s the aim of our organisation. The more people, the better for our democracy, the more views are going to be heard and the more people engaging.”
SayYes Australia, set up to support the Gillard government’s proposed carbon pricing scheme, told its Facebook site on Monday that the questions until that point were ”totally dominated by sceptic talking points”.
It invited its readers to vote for questions that ”reflect the real facts”. Activist organisation GetUp! posted the same notice.
Questions about renewable energy, the role of animal agriculture in climate change, and the climate policies of centre-right governments around the world are now in the top 10.
By 11am on Thursday, readers had asked 415 questions and cast 13,620 votes. Each person who registers on the site at sundayage.oursay.org can cast up to seven votes. This suggests that almost 2000 people have registered on the site and voted in this poll.
The questions outside the top 10 range from the hyper-local to the global, from questions about the science, to the economics and politics of climate change.
