Yale Project on Climate Change Communication Report Released: Extreme Weather and Climate Change in the American Mind

Last week the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication inconjunction with the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication, issued a report titled, Extreme Weather and Climate Change in the American Mind (2012).  The 30-page report available here,

Highlights

• A large and growing majority of Americans say “global warming is affecting weather in the United States” (74%, up 5 points since our last national survey in March 2012).

• Asked about six recent extreme weather events in the United States, including record high summer temperatures, the Midwest drought, and the unusually warm winter and spring of 2011-12, majorities say global warming made each event “worse.”  

• Americans were most likely to connect global warming to the record high temperatures in the summer of 2012 (73%). 

• Americans increasingly say weather in the U.S. has been getting worse over the past several years (61%, up 9 percentage points since March).A majority of Americans (58%) say that heat waves have become more common in their local area over the past few decades, up 5 points since March, with especially large increases in the Northeast and Midwest (+12 and +15 points, respectively).  

• More than twice as many Midwesterners say they personally experienced an extreme heat wave (83%, up 48 points since March) or drought (81%, up 55 points) in the past year. 

• One in five Americans (20%) says they suffered harm to their health, property, and/or finances from an extreme heat wave in the past year, a 6-point increase since March. In addition, 15 percent say they suffered harm from a drought in the past year, up 4 points.

Survey Results – Americans and Attitudes About the EPA. NRDC

A recent Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) telephone survey by Infogroup/ORC of 1,007 Americans conducted from September 10-13, 2010 shows the following:

More than four out of five Americans (82 percent) support the work of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, with 45 percent supporting it strongly compared to only 9 percent who strongly oppose it.

About three out of four Americans (73 percent) support “protecting the U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency’s authority” to “take steps that will reduce greenhouse gas emissions from electric utilities and other major industrial Polluters.” Support is fairly evenly divided between “strongly” (38 percent) and “somewhat” (34 percent). By contrast, only about one in four Americans (24 percent) oppose the EPA’s authority to control carbon dioxide pollution, with just 15 percent in the “strongly oppose category.