Only 13% of Americans know that more than 90% of scientists believe in global warming

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Date: July 6, 2017 at 12:17:39 PM EDT
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Only 13% of Americans know that more than 90% of scientists believe in global warming
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> Only 13% of Americans know that more than 90% of scientists believe in global warming
> That’s not good.
> By Ruairí Arrieta-Kenna
> Jul 6 2017
> <https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/7/6/15924444/global-warming-consensus-survey>
>
> A new report shows that the vast majority of Americans have no clue what the scientific consensus on climate change 
> is.
>
> According to the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and the George Mason University Center for Climate 
> Change Communication, which conduct an annual survey on what Americans think about climate change, only 13 percent of 
> Americans correctly identified that more than 90 percent of all climate scientists have concluded that human-caused 
> global warming is happening. (It’s actually at least 97 percent of climate scientists that agree human-caused global 
> warming is happening.)
>
> The Yale-GMU report, published yesterday, is based on a survey of 1,266 adults from May 18 to June 6 of this year, 
> and the results have an average margin of error of 3 percentage points.
>
> Why is perception of scientific consensus so important? Turns out that it’s actually a “gateway belief” to support 
> for public action on climate change, according to a studyfrom 2015 cited in the report. In other words, the more one 
> perceives there to be a scientific consensus on the reality of human-caused climate change, the more likely they are 
> to believe that it is real and worrisome. And the more one believes that human-caused climate change is real and 
> worrisome, the more likely one is to support public action on the issue.
>
> Now, it seems this particular finding from the report has remained pretty consistent with past surveys, which means 
> the Trump administration hasn’t dramatically impacted the public’s understanding of the consensus.
>
> While the administration refuses to clarify whether the president thinks climate change is real, widely overstates 
> uncertainty about climate change, and is reportedly planning "red team, blue team" exercises to evaluate climate 
> science, it “hasn’t specifically gone after the consensus as a fact,” Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale 
> Program on Climate Communication and one of the study authors, said. But the Trump administration does seem to intend 
> to “perpetuate the myth that there is no scientific consensus,” his co-author, Edward Maibach at George Mason, told 
> me.
>
> And they both suggest that the red-team approach could end up sowing fresh seeds of doubt in the consensus. Whether 
> or not the Trump administration’s dangerous antics will shift public understanding on climate change is still 
> unknown, Leiserowitz says. More likely, he believes, Trump “can reinforce or strengthen the disbelief [in 
> human-caused climate change] of many of his supporters.”
>
> [snip]
>
> Dewayne-Net RSS Feed: <http://dewaynenet.wordpress.com/feed/>



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