Climate Progress: An insider's view of climate science, politics, and solutions

I suspect the results of “The effects of gender on climate change knowledge and concern in the American public” will come as no surprise to at least half of my readers.  Or perhaps it will, since the Population and Environment study finds that:

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By Kalen Pruss of CAP’s executive team.

Large majorities of Florida, Maine, and Massachusetts residents believe that global warming is real—and that humans are causing it.

So says the latest poll from Jon Krosnick, senior fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University.  Krosnick found that large majorities of Florida, Maine, and Massachusetts residents believe that:

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Ruy Teixeira, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, shows us how the oil spill has been shifting public opinion on offshore drilling, little by little, in this repost.

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The drumbeat of public support for comprehensive clean energy and global warming policies beats louder every day.  The latest Wall Street Journal-NBC Poll found overwhelming support for comprehensive clean energy legislation that includes carbon pollution reductions.  It also registered that cleaning up the BP oil disaster and energy reform is the number two priority of Americans.  Finally, it registered another drop in support for the expansion of offshore oil drilling.

CAP’s Daniel J. Weiss has the details:

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This is Gallup’s tracking poll since January.  Pretty hard to discern any meaningful trend.  You certainly would be hard pressed to pick out any evidence of a BP-disaster effect.

Nate Silver notes that even on the narrower question of Obama’s handling of the disaster — [I only used "spill" in the headline this one time so it would fit on one line] — Obama’s numbers are flat if not slightly rebounding:

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The Yale Project on Climate Change just released a poll that found growing support for measures to reduce global warming pollution.   It interviewed 1,024 people from May 14 to June 1, and compared the results to a similar poll it conducted in January 2010.  CAP’s Daniel J. Weiss and intern Ariel Powell have the story.

There was more support or more intense support in the June survey for the following actions.

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In the wake of the largest oil disaster in U.S. history, two just released polls by USA Today/Gallup show that Americans are increasingly skeptical of increased offshore drilling — and increasingly support environmental protection.  In the one month since the April 20^th explosion at the Deepwater Horizon rig, support for more offshore drilling has dropped by nearly 20 percent – a big change in a short period of time.

Gallup pollster Jeffrey M. Jones notes that:

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When asked “What do you think is the most important problem facing the country today?” about 49 percent of respondents answered the economy or unemployment, while only 1 percent mentioned the environment or global warming.

But when asked, “What do you think will be the most serious problem facing the world in the future if nothing is done to stop it?” 25 percent said the environment or global warming, and only 10 percent picked the economy. In fact, environmental issues were cited more often than any other category, including terrorism, which was only mentioned by 10 percent of respondents.

I have written about the work of Stanford’s Jon Krosnick before (see “USA Today: Some scientists misread poll data on global warming controversy” and “Large majority of Americans continue to believe global warming is real and trust scientists“).

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A large majority of Americans continue to understand that global warming is real.  In fact, warming of the climate system in recent decades is “unequivocal,” according to comprehensive analysis of observations around the globe by the world’s leading climate scientists.

Most of the decline in understanding seen in recent polls comes from conservatives and conservative-leaning independents, who are incessantly hammered with the myth of “global cooling” in the conservative and mainstream media.

And, in a rather unfortunate coincidence, we’ve seen below average temperatures in parts of the United States over the last two years.  That’s particularly true during this uber-warm winter.

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Conservatives have been doing their best to torpedo the movement toward clean energy by hyping controversies about the science behind global warming. But whatever effect these controversies have had on the public they do not appear to have undermined support for action on the clean energy front, as polling expert and CAP Senior Fellow Ruy Teixeira explains.

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