Poll Finds Science Doubters Increasingly Believe World is Warming

A new Associated Press-GfK Poll released today finds that almost four of every five Americans now believe that temperatures are on the rise and global warming will become a serious problem if nothing is done about it. The GfK Group is Germany’s largest market research institute.

The most interesting finding is within one subgroup – those people who do not trust scientists on the environmental front.

According to the Associated Press, “In follow-up interviews, some of those doubters said they believe their own eyes as they’ve watched thermometers rise, New York City subway tunnels flood, polar ice melt and Midwestern farm fields dry up.”

Overall, the belief in rising temperatures is at 78% and 80% calling it a serious problem.  These numbers are only slightly higher from three years ago and, in general, those numbers have fluctuated over time but remain between 70% and 85%.

According to the AP, “The biggest change in the polling is among people who trust scientists only a little or not at all. About 1 in 3 of the people surveyed fell into that category.”

“Within that highly skeptical group, 61 percent now say temperatures have been rising over the past 100 years. That’s a substantial increase from 2009, when the AP-GfK poll found that only 47 percent of those with little or no trust in scientists believed the world was getting warmer,” the report continues.

Jon Krosnick, a Stanford University professor in political psychology, who helped AP construct the poll, argued that this is a critical new development because “opinion about climate change doesn’t move much in core groups – like those who deny it exists and those who firmly believe it’s an alarming problem.”

This group is not the hard-core global warming deniers, but rather the next tier who have serious doubts.

“They don’t believe what the scientists say, they believe what the thermometers say,” Professor Krosnick told the AP. “Events are helping these people see what scientists thought they had been seeing all along.”

The AP interviewed Phil Adams, a self-described freelance photographer from North Carolina, who calls himself “fairly cynical” about scientists and their theories.

But, reports the AP, “he believes very much in climate change because of what he’s seen with his own eyes.”

“Having lived for 67 years, we consistently see more and more changes based upon the fact that the weather is warmer,” he said. “The seasons are more severe. The climate is definitely getting warmer.”

By party, 83 percent of Democrats and 70 percent of Republicans say the world is getting warmer. And 77 percent of independents say temperatures are rising

Among scientists who write about the issue in peer-reviewed literature, the belief in global warming is about 97 percent, according to a 2010 scientific study.

“The latest AP-GfK poll jibes with other surveys and more in-depth research on global warming, said Anthony Leiserowitz, director of Yale University’s Project on Climate Change Communication,” the AP reported.

He believes that the improvement in the economy and the fact that the weather is both warmer and worse, makes it easier to connect weather events to climate change.

“One extreme event after another after another,” Professor Leiserowitz said. “People have noticed. … They’re connecting the dots between climate change and this long bout of extreme weather themselves.”

The turn in public opinion may be too late to mitigate the destruction due to these changes.

Global emissions of carbon dioxide hit a record high in 2011, the study found, with an increase of about 3 percent over the previous year.

The result is that scientists who were hoping that global warming could be limited to about 2 degrees Celsius now believe that is increasingly unlikely.

Part of the problem is that, of the top ten polluters on the planet, only the US and Germany reduced their carbon dioxide emissions.

China remains the world’s biggest carbon dioxide polluter, accounting for 28 percent of all global emissions, and the US was second at 16%.  There is, of course, a huge caveat there, as the Chinese have a far lower per-capita emission than the US.

“The level of CO2 has increased by 41% since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution – enough to help warm the planet by 1.5˚ F since 1850,” Time reports.

The report found that the increase in emissions has already boosted temperatures by 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (the 2 degrees Celsius), “considered the maximum amount of warming that the planet might be able to endure without serious consequences.”

The bleak news means that no matter what we do in the future, we are likely to face catastrophic change.

“These latest figures come amidst climate talks in Doha,” said Corinne Le Quere, the director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research and a member of the Global Carbon Project. “But with emissions continuing to grow, it’s as if no one is listening to the entire scientific community.”

A poll released right after the election showed that 68 percent of Americans see climate change as a “serious problem” – a poll conducted by Rasmussen, noteworthy in part due to the conservative leaning of recent Rasmussen polls.

Of the 1,000 likely voters surveyed, 68 percent said they thought climate change is a somewhat serious or very serious problem, while 30 percent of respondents said it was not a serious problem.

That polling shows a huge shift in the public’s perception of the issue.  In 2009, a similar poll found that only 46 percent of Americans thought climate change a serious issue.

In July in a similar poll by the Washington Post, 60 percent said they believed climate change was real.

—David M. Greenwald reporting

Categories: