Public Awareness

PUBLIC AWARENESS IN the United States of the issue of global warming increased from about one-third in the early 1980s to near 100 percent 25 years later. By 2007, climate change was featured in the media almost daily. Awareness does not necessarily imply acceptance; although polls indicate that over half of Americans consider climate change to be real, there remains widespread public uncertainty about the degree to which human activities are involved, and to what extent CO2 emissions need to be curtailed. There also remain widespread misconceptions about the meaning of global warming, and likely effects.

Public acceptance of human-induced climate change as a real phenomenon has lagged well behind the scientific consensus. In the mid-1970s, the popular media widely reported that the Earth was cooling and may be entering the next glacial interval, accelerated by light reflected off atmospheric particulates from pollution. The reports were based on the ideas of several scientists espoused primarily outside peer-reviewed literature. By the late 1970s, scientific consensus emerged from early generation global climate models that the warming influence of greenhouse gases was stronger than the cooling influence of particulates and insolation change. Scientific evidence that the climate was warming first received major coverage in a 1981 front-page article in the New York Times. Considerable advances in scientific understanding of current and past climate change occurred in the 1980s; this received enhanced public recognition with the 1988 congressional testimony by clima-tologists that coincided with a record hot summer.

As calls for government controls to reduce greenhouse gases increased, climate change discussions and media coverage of it grew politicized. In the 1990s, media, in efforts to offer “balanced” reporting, covered a small number of climate change skeptics in roughly equal proportion to the scientific consensus that climate is warming, which had grown to close to 100 percent in peer-reviewed scientific literature. The public was thereby given the impression that a considerable scientific controversy still existed. Debate about U.S. participation in the international Kyoto Accord in late 1997 and again in 2001 further increased politicization of the issue.

Several events in the mid-2000s swung U.S. public opinion from simple awareness of the issue to greater acceptance that global warming was happening. During this time, skeptics also changed stances, from whether climate change was happening to whether humans were causing observed changes. The severe hurricane season of 2005 (in particular, Hurricanes Katrina and Rita) centered U.S. public attention on potential domestic human and financial costs of climate change. Al Gore's 2006 documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, one of the most watched documentaries of all time, stimulated a groundswell of activity to further increase awareness, though to some degree maintaining the politicization of the issue. Several very warm years globally during the 2000s also helped give climate change greater reality to a broader geographic segment of U.S. citizens accustomed to hearing about warming in other areas of the world.