Resource Type: Research & Articles

When messaging about climate impacts, don’t lead with temperature goals. For most people, “1.5°C” of global warming just doesn’t seem that bad. In the US, nearly 50% of respondents felt there would be no change or perhaps even slight improvement to life on a hotter Earth. Globally, the average person believed the U.N proposed a cap on warming of an additional 4°C (putting us on track for an utter catastrophe.) Globally, less than a third of people know what the Paris Agreement is.

Discussion on climate change on Twitter is clearly politically polarized. Studying 6.8 million tweets that mentioned “fake news” and “global warming” or “climate change”, the majority of tweets focus on the United States context. The anti-Democratic online community was more active on Twitter than the anti-conservative or anti-Republican community. More than half the examined most retweeted posts contained claims about climate change being a natural cycle or even denying it exists, while about a third of these tweets stated that climate change was human-caused. This study argues that fake news as a term has a hollow meaning, as it is used as a buzzword to discredit opponents and further the political agenda of different parties not only in the United States but also in other Western countries like Australia.

This post includes a roundup of climate and environment headlines, data points, and key takeaways from this week’s public polls – including a major new report on Americans’ shifting climate change attitudes from the Yale and GMU programs on climate change communication, plus fresh polling about the Build Back Better plan and how voters view climate-friendly policies in the context of rising living costs and gas prices.