Gina McCarthy, national climate adviser, speaks as John Kerry, special presidential envoy for climate, listens during a daily press briefing at the White House on April 22, 2021: Alex Wong/Getty Images

Public Opinion Analysis –
By Glynn Wilson –

Is the glass half full or half empty? It’s unclear whether we should report this as good news, meaning we are making progress informing the American public to pay attention to climate change news, or bad news showing that half of Americans are ignorant boobs.

According to new survey research from Morning Consult, 50 percent of voters in the United States now believe climate change poses a “critical threat” to the country’s vital interests in the next decade.

This is an increase of 10 percentage points from a poll taken in June, 2017, about the time then-President Donald Trump was calling it a hoax from the White House, and it represents a 6 point increase from a poll taken in March 2019.

To look at the numbers another way, 76 percent of American voters say climate change is an important threat, but only 50 percent say it is a critical threat, while 26 percent say it is “an important but not critical threat.”

We don’t know what dark media world everyone else is living in, but 19 percent said the phenomenon is “not an important threat at all” and five percent simply had no opinion.

Of course 75 percent of Democrats know it is a critical threat, an increase of 16 points from previous polling before Joe Biden was elected and sworn in and started talking about it as an important issue. Predictably, only 21 percent of Republicans think climate change is a critical threat, and 37 percent acknowledge the threat but say it is not critical.

Yes, there are other problems and crises going on in the country and around the world, and people are right to pay attention to news about them. According to Morning Consult polling, 69 percent of American voters identify cyberattacks as a critical threat, followed by 65 percent who worry about domestic terrorism, 55 percent name the nuclear program of North Korea and 54 percent say a nuclear threat from Iran is critical. Interestingly in the wake of the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 51 percent of Americans say white supremacists and right-wing racist militia groups are a critical threat.

“Last week’s climate summit was a sort of grand public display from the Biden administration to reassure the world that the United States will be proactive about climate change,” Morning Consult reports. “And with the country’s announcement of its own more ambitious greenhouse gas emissions pledge and its encouragement of the same from others, President Joe Biden made clear that rejoining the Paris Climate Agreement on his first day in office was more than mere gesture.”

“For voters, the administration’s doubling down seems to have come at the right moment,” Morning Consult analysts say.

The latest poll found that a significant majority, 60 percent of voters, believe the country should be a part of the Paris Agreement and only 22 percent said it should not. While this is up slightly from the 2017 poll, with 57 percent saying yes and 24 percent saying no after Trump pulled the United States from the treaty, the bump barely clears the poll’s margin of error or 2 percentage points. A total of 1,990 voters were interviewed in the survey.

The Paris Climate Agreement enlists 197 countries to make commitments to reduce global emissions and keep warming to below 1.5 degrees Celsius, compared with pre-industrial levels.

“While the threat of climate change has seemed to loom increasingly large over the course of the past four years,” Morning Consult says, “the share of voters who said the United States should be a part of the Paris Agreement has remained fairly steady.”

Of course this survey research only asks about the threat of climate change to vital American interests in the next decade. It does not ask about the looming threat to human survival on planet Earth over the rest of this century. Now that is a survey we would like to see, and more reporting on.

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Glynn Wilson is a certified analyst on public opinion research, having studied it in a Ph.D. program at the University of Tennessee, obtaining a Master’s degree in communications specializing in media coverage and public opinion from the University of Alabama and running a public opinion lab in the mid-1990s, and studying journalism and Political Science as an undergraduate at UA in the early 1980s. He has been covering public opinion as a journalist for 40 years.