Earth's Dashboard Is Flashing Red—Are Enough People Listening?
As scientists and much of the public differ on the causes of climate change, the planet keeps getting warmer … and the effects are adding up.
Scientists are having trouble convincing the public that people are changing the climate.
A Pew Research Center survey, released last week as part of a broader report on science and society, found that only 50 percent of Americans believe that humans are mostly responsible for climate change, while 87 percent of scientists accept this view. This 37-point gap persists even though thousands of scientists during the past few decades have been involved in publishing detailed reports linking climate change to carbon emissions.
Evidence of a human role in climate change keeps piling up. Recent studies of record-breaking temperatures, rising sea levels, and high levels of heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere all point to an Earth under stress from
