Perception of Climate Change in USA

.A recent study titled Perception of Climate Change published in August 2012 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) led by NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies head James Hansen, compared summer and winter temperatures from 1951 to 1980 with the three decades since.

The base period had “conditions resembling those of the Holocene, the world in which civilization developed” the report says. The last three decades have been a “rapid global warming period.”  Over these past 30 years, it found, seasonal-mean temperature anomalies have changed dramatically, especially in summer.

In the PNAS report section titled Broader Implications (on page 8), Hansen and his fellow researchers concluded: “With the temperature amplified by global warming and ubiquitous surface heating from elevated greenhouse gas amounts, extreme drought conditions can develop.”

Instead, a July 2012 in a The Washington Post/Stanford University poll showed that public concern about climate change had dropped to all-time lows. Only 18 percent said it was the world’s top environmental concern, surpassed by air and water pollution. Five years ago climate change was number 1, with 33 percent citing it as the top world concern.

• Hansen, James; Sato, Makiko; Ruedy, Reto: Perception of Climate Change, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), August 2012, www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1205276109

• Eilperin, Juliet; Craighill, Peyton M.: Global warming no longer Americans’ top environmental concern, poll finds, The Washington Post, July 2012.

• Washington Post/Stanford University poll: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/documents/global-warming-poll-2.pdf

Este blog cuenta con la colaboración de la Fundación Española para la Ciencia y la Tecnología – Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación