I was looking recently at a CNN quiz about American attitudes to climate change. It's not my intention to brag about my score, but rather to share some of the more unexpected findings in the two questions that I got wrong.
In the question "Which country would you say is more skeptical of climate change, America or Norway?", it turns out the answer is Norway. Yes, Norway! In Scandinavia! In fact, of the 14 industrialized countries polled, Australia has the highest proportion of skeptics (at 17%), followed by Norway (15%), New Zealand (13%) and then the USA (12%). At the other end of the scale were Spain (2%), Germany (4%) and Switzerland (4%). Canada, as ever, was somewhere in the middle with 8%. The full survey can be found in a Global Environmental Change report published in May 2015.
The other question I got wrong was "What percentage of Americans rarely or never talks about climate change?" to which the answer is apparently 74%. So, fully three-quarters of Americans never hear someone they know talk about climate change! And, according to the March 2015 Yale Project on Climate Change Communication report from which this figure is taken, this has increased drastically from 60% in 2008.
Another question asked "What percentage of Americans know the answer to Question 1?", which was the question that asked what percentage of the world's working climate scientists believe that climate change is real and that we humans are causing it (to which the answer was 97%). Apparently, only about 10% of Americans are aware that there is a near-consensus among scientists on climate change (this also comes from the same Yale Project on Climate Change Communication report). The only reason I got this one right was because the alternative answer (50%) seemed too high.
Scary stuff indeed!
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