The mercurial rise and fall of Americans’ belief in climate change
RARELY HAS climate change been discussed in America as often as it is today. The Green New Deal, a utopian but implausible spending programme proposed by some Democrats, has been championed by left-leaning commentators and pilloried by conservatives. Despite a spate of wildfires and hurricanes, President Donald Trump pointed to Januarys cold snap in the Midwest as evidence that warnings about climate change are overblown. Economists predict that global warming could knock 5% off Americas GDP by 2100, with particularly drastic effects in rural states that mostly supported Mr Trump. Americans of different political factions have seen different headlines about the matter, but they have certainly been paying attention. Nearly two-thirds of them have heard of the Green New Deal, according to Navigator Research, a pollster, with Republicans more aware than Democrats. Americans looked up climate change or global warming on Google more often in the first three months of 2019 than they had in the same period during the previous eight years. And a poll published last week by Gallup found that 44% of the country worries a great deal about climate change, just below the record of 45% in 2017. (The figure is 69% among Democrats, and just 12% among Republicans.) Environmentalists might hope that Americans are gradually accepting the overwhelming scientific evidence regarding man-made global warming. But Gallups historical polling offers a more depressing picture. The recent spike in climate-change awareness seems to be merely the latest in a long sequence of highs and lowsand it is barely higher than previous peaks. The 44% of Americans who worry a lot about global warming today are scarcely more numerous than the 41% who felt that way in 2007, or the 40% in 2000. Meanwhile, the proportions of Americans who believe that global warming has already begun (59%) and that scientists agree on its existence (65%) are currently ten percentage points greater than they were in 2011, but roughly equal to their sizes in 2006. What explains this cycle of enlightenment and ignorance? One possible explanation is that high-profile political debates briefly alert the public to the dangers of climate change before other issues distract them. The first peak in Gallups data, around 2000, coincided with a tussle between Democrats and Republicans about the Kyoto Protocol, a set of emissions targets that Bill Clinton signed up to but George W. Bush refused to ratify. The September 11th attacks and Americas war on terror quickly turned the political focus elsewhere. The second peak, in 2007, followed the release of An Inconvenient Truth, an Oscar-winning documentary about the greenhouse effect narrated by Al Gore, formerly Mr Clintons vice president. This renewed awareness faded during the financial crisis of 2008. The data offer little hope that this time will be different. The Green New Deal has drawn far fewer searches than An Inconvenient Truth did, and the volume is already dwindling. Navigator Researchs survey found that only 22% of Americans support the plan, with 29% opposing it. And Gallups polls show a slight decline in concern about climate change since 2017, which suggests that the real cause of the recent surge was the furore over Mr Trump pulling out of the Paris climate agreement. Perhaps the only shred of comfort is in Googles data, which show a 50% drop in searches for climate change during the summer months. The probable cause is not hot weather but school holidays, since a similar fall occurs on weekends. Most of Americas climate awareness therefore seems to be generated by students Googling answers during lessons or after school. A large factor in the success of An Inconvenient Truth was its inclusion in school curriculums. If environmentalists want to convince Americans about the impending threat, they will need to start in the classroom.