Noise of the Crowd

This is the latest in the series of blogs on Carbon Brief’s new energy and climate change poll. It was written by Ros Donald and Christian Hunt and the original is available here.

Are scientists, communicators and policymakers too preoccupied about whether people ‘believe’ in human-caused climate change or not? Polling by Carbon Brief shows that while people may not be sure whether humans are warming the planet, the majority still wants action now to abate climate change.

According to polling carried out for Carbon Brief by Opinium, 89 per cent of respondents said they believe climate change is happening. Only six  per cent said they did not believe the climate is changing.

But opinion was divided when it came to what’s causing climate change. The majority – 56 per cent – said humans are causing the warming, but a significant number – around 33 per cent – believe it’s mostly down to natural causes.

Question: Which of the following statements do you agree with most? Climate change is happening and is mostly caused by humans; Climate change is happening and is mostly caused by natural processes; Climate change is not happening.

How significant is this? We found that despite the confusion about what’s causing global warming, 67 per cent of respondents want action to abate emissions now. That’s compared to 13 per cent who said we don’t need to worry about doing anything now and 12 per cent who said it would never be a problem.

Question: Which of the following statements do you agree with most?

So whatever people’s beliefs about the causes of climate change, they still want us to do something about it.

Previous study

This result mirrors the outcome of  an Angus Reid poll, released just after the Copenhagen climate summit and the leak of climate scientists’ emails from the University of East Anglia in 2010. These events are widely reported in the media as being the cause of much skepticism in the public.

Yet even at this time, when ‘belief’ in climate change appears to have taken a knock, people still said they wanted action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Nearly two thirds of those who said they think climate change hadn’t been proven were still satisfied that countries had committed to reducing emissions under the Copenhagen Accord.

Climate effects

Carbon Brief also wanted to find out what people thought would happen to the weather in 10 years’ time as the climate warms.

Most people – 68 per cent – said there will be more rainfall as a result of climate change. The second-highest percentage – 46 per cent – said climate change would lead to colder winters. 36 and 34 per cent respectively said there would be hotter and drier summers and more summer heatwaves. 27 per cent said there would be warmer winters and 12 per cent said there would be less rainfall.

Perhaps these answers aren’t surprising.  They come after a particularly wet year: 2012 was the second-wettest on record, according to the UK Environment Agency. It’s also been an extremely cold winter, and doesn’t look set to get any warmer until the end of April, the Met Office has warned.

These results appear to mirror findings from a previous survey by researchers from the University of British Columbia, which suggested local weather conditions can influence people’s attitudes to climate change. Carbon Brief’s climate change questions are going to be issued once every six months, so we will be able to measure whether this finding applies to our questions, too.

Question: To what extent do you agree or disagree with the following statements about what is likely to happen in the next ten years as a result of climate change?

Note: Global warming vs climate change

We wanted to be sure whether the terms ‘climate change’ and ‘global warming’ meant different things to people, so we split up some of our questions – with half answering questions on climate change and the other half answering on global warming. We found that there doesn’t appear to be much difference between the two in people’s minds.

83 per cent said they thought global warming is happening, with 52 per cent saying it’s mostly human-caused and 31 per cent saying it’s mostly natural. Only eight per cent said it’s not happening. 65 per cent said we should act now, 12 per cent said we don’t need to worry at the moment and 14 per cent said it would probably never be a problem.

Carbon Brief polling

Carbon Brief conducted a poll of over 2,000 people, asking questions about their attitudes to climate change and energy policy. We have released the full results today –  you can download our climate polling results here and the energy findings here.

Here are the tables this blog is based on:

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 4th, 2013 at 08:20 and is filed under Climate Sock. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.