Most Americans are worried about climate change, and many think the government should fight it, according to the results of two independent polls released this week. The surveys suggest that Americans are finally warming to the scientific consensus about climate change: that it’s real, it’s happening now, and that we are causing it — but the big question is whether that will be enough to spark real political change.
One of the surveys, called Climate Change in the American Mind, comes out of a collaboration between Yale and George Mason University. It probes how a random sample of more than 1,100 people feel about global warming — such as whether they’re worried about it, for example, and whom they think it will harm. The other survey, conducted by researchers at the University of Chicago and The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, asked roughly 1,200 people questions like whether they’d be willing to pay to fight climate change. Both surveys aimed to be nationally representative.
“We’ve never seen a shift like that before.”
The results line up where the two surveys overlap: both report that around 70 percent of Americans agree climate change is real. The Climate Change in the American Mind survey finds that 69 percent of Americans say they’re “somewhat worried” about global warming. That’s the finding that stands out for Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and one of the survey’s co-investigators: it’s seven percentage points higher than when people were asked the same question back in March. “We’ve never seen a shift like that before,” he told The Verge in an interview.
The shift parallels increases in the percentage of people who think climate change will hurt them (49 percent), their families (56 percent), and their communities (57 percent). And it comes on the heels of a devastating year of extreme events exacerbated by climate change, like California’s wildfires. In fact, the survey reports that roughly half of Americans saw a link between climate change and the severity of the fires that burned in the West.
Andrew Dessler, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University who was not involved in the surveys, attributes that to better messaging about the links between climate change and certain extreme weather events. “As much as scientists take a lot of crap for being bad communicators, there are a lot of scientists out there who are communicating the science quite effectively,” Dessler says in an interview with The Verge.
“It’s no longer an abstract notion to most Americans.”
As a result, people now see climate change as more of an immediate, local threat than they have in the past, according to Ed Maibach, director of the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication and a co-investigator of the Climate Change in the American Mind survey. “It’s no longer an abstract notion to most Americans; it’s now become a very concrete notion of a threat that’s come home to roost in their community,” he says.
Even if most Americans finally accept the scientific consensus, does it really matter if the US government is still enacting policies that contribute to climate change, like pushing for fossil fuel drilling on public lands? Dessler is skeptical. He points to a similar case of governmental gridlock over gun control despite overwhelming public support for regulations like universal background checks. “There are certain policies that essentially everyone agrees about, and those policies can’t even get a vote in the Senate,” he says.
There’s a similar gap between public opinion and action that stands out in the University of Chicago’s survey. Of the people who don’t deny the reality of climate change, 83 percent want the government to intervene. Overall, 44 percent of Americans are okay with a carbon tax, and 57 percent are even willing to chip in an extra dollar a month on their electricity bill to help. But if that fee rises to $40 per month, the percentage of people willing to pay drops to 23 percent.
“That’s the troubling thing at the core of this poll and at the core of climate policy in general.”
Even as the percentage of people who accept the reality of climate change has increased, the numbers reflecting how much people are willing to pay have stayed pretty much the same over the past three years, says Sam Ori, executive director of the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago. “We’re concerned about it, we believe it’s real, but our willingness to pay to deal with it is not going up,” Ori says. “That’s the troubling thing at the core of this poll and at the core of climate policy in general.”
But Leiserowitz thinks that this growing shift in public opinion does matter. He points to state and local initiatives, like the 281 cities and counties that have committed to reduce greenhouse emissions. “That’s where you see tremendous action taking place and that, of course, tends to only happen where there is public support,” he says. “No politician is going to go completely against what the public wants.”
Eventually, Dessler predicts that everyone will believe climate change is happening and that it’s our fault. He’s already seeing the shift in the students he teaches. But he’s worried that if that shift happens too slowly and doesn’t inspire action, we’ll keep damaging our planet. “The problem of disbelief will solve itself,” he says. “It’s just a question of how long it takes, and how much carbon we emit in the meantime.”