A
poll due for release on Wednesday shows that a large
majority of Americans believe that this year’s unusually warm
winter, last year’s blistering summer and some other weather
disasters were probably made worse by global warming. And by a
2-to-1 margin, the public says the weather has been getting
worse, rather than better, in recent years.
The survey, the most detailed to date
on the public response to weather extremes, comes atop other
polling showing a recent uptick in concern about climate change.
Read together, the polls suggest that direct experience of
erratic weather may be convincing some people that the problem
is no longer just a vague and distant threat.
“Most people in the country are
looking at everything that’s happened; it just seems to be one
disaster after another after another,” said
Anthony A. Leiserowitz of
Yale University, one of the researchers who commissioned the
new poll. “People are starting to connect the dots.”
The poll opens a new window on public
opinion about climate change.
A large majority of climate scientists
say the climate is shifting in ways that could cause serious
impacts, and they cite the human release of greenhouse gases as
a principal cause. But a tiny, vocal minority of researchers
contests that view, and has seemed in the last few years to be
winning the battle of public opinion despite slim scientific
evidence for their position.
The poll suggests that a solid
majority of the public feels that global warming is real, a
result consistent with other polls that have asked the question
in various ways. When invited to agree or disagree with the
statement, “global warming is affecting the weather in the
United States,” 69 percent of respondents in the new poll said
they agreed, while 30 percent disagreed.
Dr. Leiserowitz’s
unit at Yale, along with
researchers at George Mason University, commissioned the
survey, conducted by
Knowledge Networks. That company surveyed 1,008 American
adults by computer in the last half of March, with a margin of
sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.
While many online polls are not
representative of the broad public, Knowledge Networks is
noted for its efforts to overcome this problem, including
giving computers to households too poor to have them. The survey
reveals public attitudes that are at least roughly consistent
with scientific
understanding of how the climate is changing.
For instance, when people were asked
whether they attributed specific events to global warming,
recent heat waves drew the largest majorities. Scientists say
their statistical evidence for an increase of weather extremes
is indeed strongest when it comes to heat waves.
Asked whether they agreed or disagreed
that global warming had contributed to the unusually warm winter
just past, 25 percent of the respondents said they strongly
agreed that it had, and 47 percent said they somewhat agreed.
Only 17 percent somewhat disagreed, and 11 percent strongly
disagreed.
Majorities almost as large cited
global warming as a likely factor in last year’s record summer
heat wave, as well as the 2011 drought in Texas and Oklahoma.
Smaller but still substantial majorities cited it as a factor in
the record United States snowfalls of 2010 and 2011 and the
Mississippi River floods of 2011. Those views, too, are
consistent with scientific evidence, which suggests that global
warming is causing heavier precipitation in all seasons.
One of the more striking findings was
that 35 percent of the public reported being affected by extreme
weather in the past year. The United States was hit in 2011 by a
remarkable string of
disasters affecting virtually every region, including
droughts, floods,
tornadoes and heat waves.
Dr. Leiserowitz said that recent
events might be puncturing the public’s “very simplistic mental
model of what global warming is supposed to be.”
Past survey work had suggested, he
said, that people tended to see the climate change problem as
“distant in time and space — that this is an issue about polar
bears or maybe Bangladesh, but not my community, not the United
States, not my friends and family.”
Because the survey questions are new,
it is not clear how people’s views about weather extremes may be
changing over time. However, more general polling by the Gallup
organization suggests that public concern about climate change,
which has waxed and waned over the years, may be starting to
rise again.
Since 1989, Gallup has asked, “how
much do you personally worry about global warming?” The
percentage of people saying they were worried peaked at 66
percent just before the
recession, then fell to a low of 51 percent in 2011, as the
economy overwhelmed other concerns.
Gallup’s most recent
survey, in March, showed an uptick to 55 percent. “It’s
certainly possible that this is the start of a trend back up,”
said Frank M. Newport, Gallup’s editor in chief, though he added
that another year of polling data would be necessary to be
certain.
Advocacy groups seeking policies to
limit climate change say that extreme weather is giving them an
opening to reach the public.
A group called
350.org is planning a worldwide series of rallies on May 5,
under the slogan “Connect the Dots,” to draw attention to the
links between climate change and extreme weather. (The group’s
name is a reference to an ideal concentration of carbon dioxide
in the atmosphere.)
“My sense from around the country and
the world is that people definitely understand that things are
getting freaky,” said
William E. McKibben, the founder of
350.org. “During that
crazy heat wave in March, everyone in Chicago was out enjoying
the weather, but in the back of their mind they were thinking,
this is not right.”