Global Warming: Opinions and Politics

This week saw the arrival of both a paper and a new survey which track the US public's awareness of climate change. The two use slightly different sources and come to slightly different conclusions, but there's one trend that trumps all: when it comes to climate change, politics dominates, eclipsing self-assessed knowledge and general education...

Both surveys asked similar questions, however, including whether climate change has occurred and whether humans were likely to be the primary cause. The scientific community, including all the major scientific organizations that have issued statements on the matter, has said yes to both of these questions, and the authors interpret their findings in light of that.

The UNH poll shows that a strong majority—in the 80-90 percent range—accepts that climate change is happening. The Gallup polls explicitly asked about global warming and got lower percentages, although it still found that a majority of the US thinks the climate is changing. Those who label themselves conservatives, however, are notably less likely to even accept that basic point; less than half of them do, while the majority of liberals and independents do...

The more registered Republicans and those who describe themselves as conservatives thought they knew about anthropogenic climate change, the less likely they were to accept the evidence for it. For Democrats and independents, the opposite was true (same for self-styled moderates and liberals). This group also did a slightly different check, and broke out opinions on global warming based on education and political leanings. For Democrats and independents, increased education boosted their readiness to accept the scientific community's conclusions. For self-styled conservatives, education had almost no effect (it gave a slight boost in registered Republicans).

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One set of polls, conducted by the University of New Hampshire, focused on a set of rural areas, including Alaska, the Gulf Coast, and Appalachia. These probably don't reflect the US as a whole, but the pollsters had about 9,500 respondents. The second, published in the The Sociological Quarterly, took advantage of a decade's worth of Earth Day polls conducted by Gallup. These each had in the area of 1,000 participants, which the authors pooled.

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gmart74 said:

lol so a poll involving 9500 people from the poorest parts of america, and another one of ~100,000 purely from earth day rallies..about global warming.... please oh well educated one, please tell me even you see how pathetically biased and worthless these studies are? there seems to be a lot of scientifically dubious polls being posted around here lately.

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BamainBoston said:

Way to address his substantive points. I am going back to not caring now.

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