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By Tara Fay, Todd Bratcher
Introduction
Global Climate Change is a political hot topic in recent years. Especially during the 2015 elections when Donald Trump called climate change a hoax. Global Climate Change is a scientifically proven occurrence caused by humans. Global Climate change effects hurricanes, sea level rise, and typhoons, among other things listed on the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration’s website (GFDL). Global climate change also affects coral reefs and other marine ecosystems. Coral reefs support social and economic growth and are therefore important to society as a whole. It is very important to protect these areas, as global warming is a grave threat that has already caused a substantial amount of damage to these ecosystems (Hughes). Coral reefs are important for tourism, aesthetics, and recreation and if they are negatively affected it may cause a negative public opinion overall. It is difficult to design construction models for new infrastructure while Global Climate Change is a pressing issue . Scientists and architecture firms have been using projected models of climate change to develop future infrastructure (Hallegatte). Environmental scientists are scrambling to find effective strategies to adapt to a changing climate. Increasing the robustness of structures is one management strategy that has been implemented to protect investments in a time of uncertainty caused by climate change (Fankhauser). This can help to protect against new issues such as sea level rise and increased hurricanes that have been occurring with a higher frequency (4-5 level) in recent years (GFDL). As climate change is an issue that affects everyone, we would find it interesting to see how the public currently views climate change.
Fig. 1 President Trump theorizes the Chinese have conspired the causes and effects of climate change.
Although it is a fact that climate change exists, many still believe that it is a “hoax” or “fake news”. In the Cambridge dictionary fake news is defined as “false stories that appear to be news, spread on the internet or using other media, usually created to influence political views or as a joke”. The term was coined by Donald Trump in the 2015 elections. He has used the term 73 times on his twitter account and many more during press conferences, meetings, etc. He uses it for anything that he doesn’t personally believe in and more dangerously, to deny scientific observations(Rosen 2017).
Current Situation
Much evidence exists to support that global climate change is occurring, and is caused by excess carbon in the atmosphere. Some of this evidence comes from ice core data in Antarctica. These ice cores can show us the amount of carbon that was in the atmosphere thousands of years ago. Today Carbon levels are the highest they have ever been, nearly doubling the amount in the air compared to levels 300 thousand years ago (Schneider 2008). Simply put, as C02 emissions raise so does the global temperature .
Studies show that over time from 1997 to 2018, the amount of Americans who express a view that global warming has been occurring with a high level of certainty has increased from 43% to 57% (Witte 2018).We would like to gauge the opinion of several counties in Southern California to see the general public opinion on climate change. We would like to see whether political views might affect views on climate change. This Fall semester, all of Dr. Anderson’s students in the Coastal Management course set out to survey 40 strangers about their opinions on the coast, climate change, and the environment as a whole. We will use specific questions from this survey to evaluate how people view the idea of Climate Change and what factors may cause their feelings.
More recently, overall public support has been increasing with regards to taking immediate actions towards climate change.(Guzman 2017) Factors contributing to overall growing support could include localized awareness efforts, shifts in political conversations/culture, and better education about the matter. Issues of climate change continue to be politicized amidst the facts provided by science (Fig 1 & 2). A survey from Yale’s Program on Climate Change/Communication found 7% of Americans are “extremely/very sure that global warming is NOT happening” despite climate change certainty increasing overall in the past three years.(Leiserowitz 2017) This means there are many Americans who still may not understand, believe, or have the desire to combat the issues of climate change. The current administration is exploiting the remaining uncertainty for political gain.(Fig 1) A Suffolk University telephone poll of 1,000 people resulted in 43% of respondents approving of the president, and 54% disapproving(Page & Hofacker 2018). There is strong reason to believe there is a correlation between approval of President Trump and climate change denial/minimization based on the current political climate.
Fig. 2 CA Congressman Rohrabacher delegitimizing climate change while running for a Republican seat in the US House of Representatives.
Hypotheses
- People who approve of the way Donald Trump is handling the presidency will be more likely to deny that climate change is an issue that we need to address.
- People with a higher education level will believe that climate change is a major problem that we need to address now.
- Individuals that live closer to the coast will care more about Climate change.
Relevant Survey Questions
We will use question 7 compared with three sub-categories: location , education, and whether or not they approve of the presidency, to study the public’s opinion of Climate Change.
- Global Climate Change is a major problem we need to address now?
- What is your zip code? (can also use counties)
- What is the highest level of education that you have attained?
- Overall, I __ of the way the following are handling their job: Donald Trump as President of the United States. Approve, neither approve or disapprove, disapprove, no opinion.
Results
Fig 3. Public opinion comparison of Presidential Approval and stance on climate change action.
Of the people who answered yes to “is global climate change a problem that we need to address”, 4.93% approved of Donald Trump’s presidency, 12.32% were neutral, 69.22% disapproved, and 9.68% had no opinion. For the people who answered no to whether climate change is a problem that we need to address now, 53.42% approved of Trump, 19.18% were neutral, 21.92% disapproved, and 9.59% had no opinion. Finally, for those who responded that they were unsure about climate change being a major problem that we need to address now, 18.52% approved of Trump, 27.16% were neutral, 37.03% disapproved, and 20.99% had no opinion.
Fig. 4 Respondents with educations levels of: some highschool(n=20), highschool(n=139), some college/college(n=934), post graduate(n=120), and their responses.
We can see that a larger proportion of people believe that climate change is a major problem regardless of education levels.
Fig. 5 Localized opinions when answering the question: Is Global Climate Change is a major problem we need to address now?
In Kern county, 100% of the 2 individuals surveyed agreed that Global Climate Change is a major problem that we need to address now. In Los Angeles county, of 354 people surveyed 85.59% agreed, 6.5% disagreed, and 7.9% did not know. Of the 13 people surveyed in Orange county, 88.89% agreed and 11.11% disagreed. San Diego county was composed of 10 survey takers, 40% of these people agreed and 60% disagreed. In Santa Barbara County 94.2% of 69 people agreed, 2.9% disagrees and 2.9% were unsure. Ventura County had the most surveys distributed. From a total of 930 surveys, 87.1% of the community agreed, 5.37 % disagreed and 7.53% were not sure.
Interpretation
For those who believe that climate change is something that we need to address now, (n=1,180) an overwhelming 69% reported disapproval of Donald Trump’s presidency so far. Compare this to the people answering that climate change is not something that we need to address now(n=81), the slight majority of them, 53%, approve of the President’s job done so far. There appears to be a correlation between approval of the president’s job and a reluctance to address the issues of climate change. Therefore, we can determine that personal opinions of climate change may be affected by personal opinions of President Donald Trump. The approval rates in this study are well above the national average approval rating of Donald Trump which is currently 39% for all Americans (Gallup).
The findings of this study could be influenced by trends of political strategy from the President. One of our president’s platforms was to say that Climate Change is a lie and is not something that we need to currently focus on.(Twitter 2018) People who voted for Trump are likely to believe in similar ideals, and therefore approve of his presidency and affect personal opinions about Climate Change.
From our results on education affecting opinion of climate change as a whole, we find that education does not affect the results.(Fig. 4) It seems that people of all education levels tend to agree that climate change is an important issue that we need to deal with now. This makes sense because Climate Change is such a hot topic and the media has promoted the idea that everyone should look into it and come up with their own ideals about the environment.
Although the results from Kern county, San Diego county and Orange county may seem intriguing at first look, the data size is not reliable. The amount of people surveyed is too small to be a reliable source of data to best interpret overall public opinion in these counties. However, the survey data collected in Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, and especially Ventura county is more reliable because a larger amount of surveys were dispersed to the community. In all three of these counties, a majority of the people agreed that global climate change is a major problem that we need to address now. In the future, it might be beneficial to survey San Diego county to get a more inclusive data set about Global Climate Change opinions in coastal Southern California.
Key Takeaways
Overwhelmingly, all of the Southern California counties surveyed, other than San Diego county, believe that Climate Change is an issue that we need to address now.(Fig. 5) We found that education level does not affect public opinion of Climate Change.(Fig. 4) We did find however, the possible correlation of approval or disapproval of Donald Trump’s presidency with differences in public opinion about Climate Change.(Fig. 3) Climate change is an increasingly extreme issue that affects all of us in here in California and it is our responsibility to act.
References
Anderson, S. 2018. Oceanography Summary. Lecture Given at CSUCI on Oct 12.
Fankhauser, S., J. B. Smith, and R. S. Tol. 1999. Weathering climate change: some simple rules to guide adaptation decisions. Ecological Economics 30:67–78.
Gallup, Inc. 2018, October 21. Presidential Approval Ratings — Donald Trump. https://news.gallup.com/poll/203198/presidential-approval-ratings-donald-trump.aspx.
Global Warming and Hurricanes. (n.d.). . NOAA. https://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/global-warming-and-hurricanes/.
Hallegatte, S. 2009. Strategies to adapt to an uncertain climate change. Global Environmental Change 19:240–247.
Hughes, T. P. 2003. Climate Change, Human Impacts, and the Resilience of Coral Reefs. Science 301:929–933.
Leiserowitz, A., Maibach, E., Roser-Renouf, C., Rosenthal, S., Cutler, M., & Kotcher, J. (2017). Climate change in the American mind: March 2018. Yale University and George Mason University. New Haven, CT: Yale Program on Climate Change Communication.
Page, S., & Hofacker, C. October 25, 2018. The midterms are all about Trump, and Democrats have the edge in the stretch. USA Today. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2018/10/25/poll-midterm-elections-donald-trump-democrats/1742432002/
Rodriguez, L. 2018. Integrated Regional Water Management Plan: Climate Change Lecture. Given at the Ventura County Government Center on October 16.
Rosen, C. (n.d.). All the Times Donald Trump Has Called Something ‘Fake News’. https://ew.com/tv/2017/06/27/donald-trump-fake-news-twitter/.
Schneider, T. (n.d.). How we know Global Warming is Real: The Science Behind Human-induced Climate Change. Skeptic 14.
Stanford University. 2018, July 24. Poll shows consensus for climate policy remains strong. https://news.stanford.edu/2018/07/16/poll-shows-consensus-climate-policy-remains-strong/.
This lovely graph.
Guzman, Camila. 2017. Climate Change. CSUCI. https://coastalwiki.piratelab.org
