Poll Finds Americans More Confused About Climate

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


This is, uh, a bit of a concern: A Pew poll released on Thursday finds the number of Americans concerned about climate change has declined—and the number of global warming skeptics has increased.

Thirty-five percent of those polled agreed that global warming was a serious problem—a nine-point drop from April 2008, when 44 percent of respondents agreed. Worse, though, is the number of skeptics. Just 57 percent think that there is “solid evidence” that the earth is warming, down from 71 percent just a year and a half ago. Only 36 percent think that the warming is due to human activity, down from 47 percent.

The decline has been sharpest among people who identify as political independents: Only 53 percent of independents see solid evidence of global warming, down from 75 percent in April 2008. Republicans were already highly skeptical—now only 35 percent of Republicans believe that global temperatures are rising, down 14 percent from the last poll. And that’s just the objective question of whether they’re rising: only 18 percent think that any warming that may be happening is caused by human activity.

But fewer Democrats think the planet is warming, too—75 percent today compared to 83 percent last year and 91 percent in August 2006. And only 50 percent of self-identified Democrats believe the warming is due to human activity.

Oh, my.

All of this comes, of course, as the Senate is preparing to take up climate change legislation. The poll also found that the majority of those polled – 55 percent — had heard nothing about cap-and-trade. Only 14 percent said they had heard “a lot” about cap-and-trade.

Perhaps the most interesting, and politically relevant, point I would draw from the data is that those who identified as Republican or independent indicated that they were more familiar with cap-and-trade than Democrats. Twenty percent of Republicans and 17 percent of independents said they “heard a lot about” cap-and-trade, compared to just 8 percent of Democrats.

Self-identified conservative Republicans reported hearing the most – 28 percent said they had heard a lot about the policy. Twenty-four percent of people who believe that there is “no solid evidence of global warming” have heard a lot about cap and trade, compared to just 10 percent among those who think that climate change is actually happening.

Part of the reason this is true, I suspect, is because environmentalists and congressional advocates for climate change legislation have avoided the term “cap-and-trade” as much as possible. Instead of talking about cap-and-trade, they talk about green jobs, a clean energy economy, pollution reduction, etc. Buoyed by survey data much like this that suggests that “cap-and-trade” is confusing and scary and people would rather hear about positive plans, they’ve shunned the term cap-and-trade. Take, for example, the Kerry-Boxer bill in the Senate, which eschews all talk of “cap-and-trade” and instead outlines a “Global Warming Pollution Reduction and Investment” program.

Republicans in Congress and their friends in the conservative think-tank world, meanwhile, have owned conversation of cap-and-trade, more often referring to it as “cap-and-tax” (see: Republican Majority Leader Rep. John Boehner, Sen. James Inhofe, Wall Street Journal editorial page, Sarah Palin, Competitive Enterprise Institute …). They’ve successfully painted the idea of “cap-and-trade” it as an evil scheme that will cost Americans millions.

But as other recent polls have found, Americans largely support the goals of a cap-and-trade plan, even if they don’t know what it exactly that term means. They like clean energy, they want to reduce pollution, and they don’t like dependence on foreign energy sources. In many ways, I think this new Pew poll shows that Republicans, conservatives, and climate change skeptics are dominating in the language battle, though Americans still support the goals of an emissions reduction plan.

The declining figures on people who believe that climate change is evening happening, however, is the distressing part of this survey. And skeptics in Congress and outside are latching on to the new poll. Fox News, for example, headlined their piece, “Americans No Longer Swallowing Global Warming Dogma.”

All of this shows that the road to passing legislation really isn’t getting any easier as time goes by.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate