Resource Type: Polling & Surveys

This post includes climate and environment headlines, data points, and key takeaways from recent public polls – including a major new international climate survey by the United Nations, new research on Americans’ beliefs about climate change and extreme weather, and new battleground polling about climate change and clean energy in the presidential race.

This post includes climate and environment headlines, data points, and key takeaways from recent public polls – including a new wave of Yale and George Mason’s long-running “Climate Change in the American Mind” survey, new battleground polling on climate change and clean energy in the presidential race, and new polling on sustainable aquaculture.

Research finds that Americans are more confident blaming climate change for extreme heat and wildfires than for other types of extreme weather such as flooding, tornadoes, and hurricanes. The recent study found that politics and personal experience played significant roles in people’s responses: Self-identified Republicans were less likely than Democrats to attribute extreme weather events to climate change, though Republicans who had personally experienced negative impacts from extreme weather events were more likely to link them to climate change than those who hadn’t. Looking at extreme weather events across the board, 83% of survey respondents said there is some link between these events and anthropogenic, or human-caused, climate change. About 17% thought climate change had nothing to do with extreme weather. More than 47% of people were “very” or “extremely confident” in linking increased wildfires to climate change, and roughly 42% of people were very or extremely confident linking extreme heat to climate change.