Guide

Public perceptions of climate change

Public Perceptions of Climate Change Download PDF

Over the past decade, public opinion about cli­mate change has become increas­ingly well doc­u­mented. Awareness about cli­mate change is very high, and a number of sur­veys have shown that the British, European and North American member of the public express sub­stan­tial con­cern about it.

For example, a Eurobarometer survey in 2007 found that around 90% of British cit­izens were con­cerned about cli­mate change (Eurobarometer, 2007). However, cli­mate change con­tinues to be a low pri­ority issue for most people when con­trasted with other soci­etal issues such as the eco­nomy, edu­ca­tion, or the threat of ter­rorism (Upham et al., 2009), and in recent years the level of reported con­cern about cli­mate change has fallen some­what, accom­panied by an increase in the number of people expressing uncer­tainty about the reality of human influ­ence on the cli­mate (BBC, 2010; Leiserowitz et al., 2010; Pew Research Centre, 2009; Whitmarsh, 2011).

Pidgeon and Fischhoff (2011) pro­duced this useful graph showing US per­cep­tions of whether people think that most cli­mate sci­ent­ists agree that cli­mate change is hap­pening, as meas­ured by Gallup polls over a period of more than ten years. Between 1998–2006, people became more sure that sci­ent­ists agreed that cli­mate change was hap­pening, but more recently the trend has been towards greater uncertainty.

Although the reasons for this decline in public con­fid­ence in cli­mate change sci­ence are com­plex, and not easy to dis­cern from opinion poll data, a recent report on global atti­tudes to cli­mate change offered this explanation:

“There are many pos­sible reasons for declines in con­cern about cli­mate change…immediate wor­ries such as job security, local school quality, crime and eco­nomic well-being have all dimin­ished media atten­tion for cli­mate stories in the past two years. In the face of other pressing con­cerns, a public “caring capa­city” for cli­mate change has been tested…Without con­tinued atten­tion paid to global warming/climate change in the media, such con­cerns may have faded from the col­lective public con­science” (Nielson, 2011).

However, there has not been the ‘col­lapse’ in public opinion that some com­ment­ators have sug­gested. A Cardiff University survey in the UK during early 2010 (Spence et al, 2010) found that a majority of people sup­ported the use of tax rev­enue to fund low-carbon policies such as invest­ment in renew­ables (68%) and said they are willing to reduce the amount of energy they use in order to tackle cli­mate change (65%). So although there is no escaping the fact that there is a major dis­parity between the level of cer­tainty expressed by cli­mate sci­ent­ists and by the gen­eral public about the basic facts of cli­mate change, a con­sid­er­able level of sup­port for policies to tackle cli­mate change remains.

Beyond basic find­ings about levels of con­cern, aware­ness and belief in human impact on the cli­mate, some recent studies have attempted to delve deeper into public atti­tudes about cli­mate change. A paper by Wouter Poortinga and his col­leagues (Poortinga et al, 2011) found that when people express uncer­tainty about cli­mate change, they are often talking about quite dif­ferent things. Although some people chal­lenge the cause of cli­mate change, a greater number are unsure about the impacts – which is actu­ally where much greater uncer­tainty exists among scientists.

Perhaps inev­it­ably, evid­ence on public atti­tudes tends to focus on European and North American mem­bers of the public. However, a recent global poll of atti­tudes to cli­mate change and sus­tain­ab­ility issues more gen­er­ally presented a com­plex inter­na­tional pic­ture. Taking all nations together, 69% of the cit­izens in 51 nations are con­cerned about cli­mate change. However, in the US, only 48% are con­cerned com­pared to 51% in 2009 and 62% in 2007, while in China levels of con­cern have also reduced from 77% in 2009 to 64% in 2011. The most con­cerned region of the world was Latin America (90%), in India, con­cern about global warming is at 86% (a rise from 80% in 2007), and in Europe con­cern has risen from 58% to 68% since 2009.

Polls on cli­mate change public opinion emerge all the time – a useful and up-to-date sum­mary of gen­eral trends up to 2011 is provided by Nick Pidgeon in a report for the UK Government’s Foresight Office (Pidgeon, 2011), and two of the best sources for keeping up to date with recent devel­op­ments are the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication and the Pew Research Centre.