Some 72 percent of respondents to a “poll” run by a publisher called Pocket Issue say global warming is a natural occurrence, according to a press release issued by the publisher and a now-popular story based on the release on a UK web site.

But the poll is bogus.

Real polls survey a cross-section of society in a random but controlled fashion in an effort to find out what the broader public actually thinks.

The results of Pocket Issue’s online poll, as with any uncontrolled poll of this sort, can be skewed wildly depending on who hears of it and who votes.

Other real polls have come up with quite different results. One in January by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that 47 percent of Americans think human activity is mostly to blame for global warming. A Fox News poll in February found 41 percent of Americans think humans are fully to blame, while 38 percent think global warming is caused by a combination of human action and normal climate patterns.

A Harris poll early this year found 61 percent of Spanish people, 56 percent of French, 55 percent of British, 54 percent of Germans and Italians, and 59 percent of Americans think “the responsibility for global warming is shared between governments, industry and people in general.” That’s not the same question as “are humans causing global warming?” but it does shed light on what various Western societies think.

Whatever your beliefs on this issue, don’t buy into the results of uncontrolled, innaccurate online polling. You might, however, invite some friends to join you in trying to skew the poll.