But they’re not willing to pay much to stop it.
A surging number of Americans understand that climate change is happening and believe that it could harm their families and the country, according to a new poll from Yale and George Mason University.
But at the same time, Americans are not any more willing to pay money to fight climate change than they were three years ago, says another new poll conducted by the Associated Press and the University of Chicago.
The polls suggest that public opinion about climate change is in a state of upheaval. Even as President Trump has cast doubt on climate change, most Americans have rejected his position. Record numbers of Americans describe climate change as a real and present danger. Nearly a quarter of the country says they already see its tidings in their day-to-day life, citing “personal observations of weather” as helping persuade them of climate change’s reality.
Despite this increasing acceptance, there is no clear political path forward. Last year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes” were needed to keep Earth’s temperature from rising 1.5 degrees Celsius. Such a transformation would be, in other words, expensive. But almost 70 percent of Americans say they wouldn’t pay $10 every month to help cool the warming planet.
The data is still striking, suggesting U. S. concern about climate change has leapt by several points in just the last year. More than seven out of 10 Americans now say that global warming is “personally important” to them, an increase of nine points since March 2018, according to the Yale poll. More Americans than ever also say they are “very worried” about climate change, an eight-point increase.
These changes are basically unprecedented. “We’ve not seen anything like that in the 10 years we’ve been conducting the study,” says Anthony Leiserowitz, a senior research scientist at Yale who helped oversee the poll.
It reflects a large shift, as an outright majority of Americans—a record-high number—believe that climate change could endanger their loved ones. Historically, most Americans have said that global warming “will harm people in the United States” while insisting that it would “not harm me, personally.
