by Patrick Appel
The AAAS is campaigning to debunk the idea that scientists disagree about climate change:
The report points to a 2013 Yale paper that found around a third of Americans thought that “there is a lot of disagreement among scientists about global warming.” Twenty percent said they didn’t know enough to say, and only 42 percent knew that “most scientists think global warming is happening.” The truth, the AAAS repeatedly states in its campaign, is that 97 percent of climate experts agree that climate change is happening.
“Based on well-established evidence, about 97% of climate scientists have concluded that human-caused climate change is happening,” they state unequivocally. “This agreement is documented not just by a single study, but by a converging stream of evidence over the past two decades from surveys of scientists, content analyses of peer-reviewed studies, and public statements issued by virtually every membership organisation of experts in this field.”
Yet according to one recent survey, an unparalleled 23 percent of the general public still doesn’t get it.
Christopher Flavelle considers the reasons Americans disbelieve in global warming:
The available polling data suggests Americans’ views on climate change increasingly have more to do with politics than science.
As I wrote in December, Republicans and Democrats used to agree about the need for stricter laws to protect the environment: More than 90 percent of respondents from both parties supported the idea in 1992.
Two decades later, the share of Democrats who said they support stricter environmental protections was still above 90 percent. But the share of Republicans who said the same had dropped by half, to 47 percent. The Pew Research Center, which performed the survey, called environmental protection arguably “the most pointed area of polarization” over that period.
What’s interesting about that change is that whatever you think about the strength of the scientific consensus on climate in 2012, it was leagues stronger than in 1992. So even as the science was becoming clearer, Republican support for doing anything about it was plummeting.
The Dish 