A new poll has found that 78% of Americans believe that global warming is a reality, and that even amongst the third of Americans who are skeptical of climate change claims by scientists 61% believe temperatures on the earth have risen over the past century.
Reason.com reports that the new AP-GfK poll indicates belief in global warming has increased significantly amongst Americans compared to only several years ago, when in 2009 only 47% of those skeptical of scientific climate change claims believed global temperatures had risen over the past hundred years.
Greater public belief in global warming is perhaps only a provisional reaction, however, to Hurricane Sandy’s recent battering of the eastern coast, with polls indicating that climate change convictions tend to rise in the immediate wake of natural disasters. 85% of Americans believed global temperatures were rising following 2005’s Hurricane Katrina, compared to 78% at present.
Despite the widespread public belief that climate change is a reality, only 57% of Americans believe that the US government should do a “great deal” to address global warming, while 53% have indicated that they are unwilling to pay higher prices to protect the environment.
Comments
Russell Cook
Entertaining how this article can’t trouble itself to distinguish ‘climate change’ from the much more specific and controversial label “man-caused global warming”.
If more of the public suspects a ruse is taking place about poll questions failing to make that distinction, the actual concern over the notion of man-caused global warming will likely plummet further. It’s long been demonstrated that very vocal skeptic climate scientists don’t dispute the basic situation over the span of the last 100 or so years, as in the example of skeptic climate scientist Dr William Gray’s New York Times quote in 2000, “I don’t think we’re arguing over whether there’s any global warming, the question is, ‘What is the cause of it?'” http://www.nytimes.com/2000/02/29/science/global-warming-the-contrarian-view.html
So the next question we need to ask is why articles like this one take on the appearance of giving out partial and potentially misleading information?