Do Americans Believe Human Activities Are Responsible for Climate Change?

Climate change due to global warming is the most debated and talked about topic these days. It was a topic discussed only among the scientists earlier. However, the effects of climate change and increasing awareness have made the common man sensitive towards this issue. Researchers at the Annenberg Public Policy Center (APPC) of the University of Pennsylvania, conducted a study to know what percentage of Americans believe in human-caused climate change? Researchers surveyed more than 7000 Americans, using three different types of questionnaires on their opinion on the climate change caused by human activities. 50 percent to 71 percent of the participants agreed to climate issues based on human activities. The lead author, Matthew Motta said it is essential to know what people think about climate change as it will decide how they will find solutions to the problem. “If we cannot accurately measure those beliefs, we may be under- or overestimating their support for different solutions. If we want to understand why the public supports or opposes different policy solutions to climate change, we need to understand what their views are on the science.” This study was published in Climatic Change. “We hope that our research can help to broadly raise awareness of measurement issues in the study of climate change opinion and alert scholars to which specific design elements are most likely to impact opinion estimates,” the researchers said.

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