Gallup Analysis: Partisan Divide on Global Warming Grows

Republican party identification has been going down compared to the Democrats since 2003 though. My guess would be most of the people who were Republicans but have enough of a brain to know global warming is real aren't willing to call themselves Republicans anymore, so it doesn't seem like too big of a loss.

Hi,

Is there a similar breakdown by profession?

Thanks for bringing this to our attention, Matthew. Really interesting. Together, there seems to be over 50% (in total) acceptance that accelerated climate change is caused by humans, so if there's a majority, where does the majority of action lie?

On the second graph, you might want to look at this in the light of an article by James Risbey that I blogged on a few weeks ago; his analysis confirmed that media reportage of climate change was, in the most, in line with the science, and not exaggerated at all.

Cheers
Alex

Chris is right, there is a very big confounding factor here in that party affiliation is constantly changing. I was one of those Republicans in 2003. I am not one of them anymore.

Matt, the divide in public perception continues to fascinate.
The first question has a correct answer. The second -- public opinion of the news coverage -- is more complicated. I'm a climate scientist, and I'm not 100% certain how I should answer that question. No doubt, the issue is vastly under-reported (given its importance). When global warming is covered, the reporting is sometimes sensationalist, due either to the nature of today's media or to a lack of understanding of the nuances.

So we see that politics is about ideology, not science. That is a two way street and as far as objective reality is concerned it is all but irrelevant.
A review of historic movements in understanding science and technology reveals that the public and the scientists both seperately and collectively can be wrong frequently enough to give a anyone who is seeking solutions reason to be suspicious of consensus, and to view science not as a way to find the solution but to come up with more questions,in contrast with politics which is all about eliminating question...which is why politics can seem to be so pervese and why it is so easily subverted.
For instance, I like Al Gore as a presenter and admire his life in public service, but I can't overlook his selection of Joe Lieberman (which more than Nader caused Bush to be prez) and earlier,when he was VP he came up with a grand program to reduce paperwork in the Federal Government...anyone who was a Federal employee then couldn't help but see Al Gore as the complete dipped-in-doodoo beaurocrat who comes up with a program to eliminate an inefficiency by some hairbrained scheme which will never work because it so fails to understand how things work at the groud level...I don't doubt the Government Paperwork Reduction Act reduced the paperwork for Al Gore but it certainly didn't help the vast majority of the people who create the vast majority of paperwork.
So, now it's Global Warming. No doubt global warming exists, as it has since the end of the YOunger Dryas...and will vascillate in accordance with complex imputs, and I know, like any kid that had a weekly reader in the 60s all about the greenhouse effect and Venus, but I also know that the actual mechanism is far too complex and that any formula with that many vairable is subject to an awfull lot of uncertainty. I also know that CO2 doesn't absorb all the infrared frequencies so it's not going to simply go up an dup and up as alarmists would have us believe.
Every day we read about the destruction of habitat due to human impacts but only anxiety over "what if" the planet warms a few degrees. The loss of populations is due to impoverished and lost habitat, not warming habitat...and to mislead people that Earth could become like Venus while failing to mention that Venus is a whole lot different than Earth and 20 million miles closer to the sun. How convenient to not have mentioned, let alone stress that fact.
I would love to see the estimated 45 trillion dollars it is expected to cost to reign-in CO2 applied towards habitat all over the world. As for Polar Bears...Polar Bears are very adaptable and if all the ice vanished tomorrow, they'd be just fine provided the seals and bird rookeries on which they feed were allowed to reclaim the habitats from which they've been expunged due to human's greedy management practices. At one time the great white sea bears lived from the St Lawrence to the Straits of Gibraltar, feasting on vast populations of seals and bird rookeries, now gone and the baseline has shifted so far that we don't even recognize what we've lost.