 Welcome to our briefing this afternoon. He and I, the environmental intervention, on college reception about local warming. We are also very, very pleased that we have had a wonderful award-winning scholarship. For the briefing, from Congresswoman Diane D'Agosta Office from Colorado. And to open our briefing with a few remarks is Eleanor Bastion who is with Representative D'Agost's office. Hi, everyone. I'll keep this very brief. I just wanted to welcome all of you on behalf of Congresswoman Diane D'Agost. We're excited to cooperate with EESI and Professor Krosnick on this briefing today. And I think as we sort of have this recess for two weeks and maybe our schedules are a little less frenzied, we can think more deeply and with a little more time about the challenges ahead of us in terms of climate change. Out in Colorado over the last couple of years, we've had two really severe natural resources challenges. One is the pine and bark beetle infestation, and then also the severe wildfires. So that's really brought to the forefront the day-to-day challenges that climate change is exacerbating. So just thanks so much to Professor Krosnick and without further ado, back to you. Thanks so much, Eleanor. And it has been really interesting as we have watched over the course of the last few years and then particularly this last year as we have seen such an incredible uptick in the number of extreme weather events which has created such hardship across so much of our country and has really put climate change on the map in so much more media coverage, so many more conversations and discussions here on Capitol Hill. This afternoon, we are very, very privileged to hear from Professor John Krosnick, who is the Frederick O'Glover Professor in Humanities and Social Sciences at Stanford University. He is also a senior fellow with the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. This afternoon, he is going to talk us through a lot of his work and analysis that comes out of a very rich history and experience that he brings. He will be highlighting results of a meta-analysis of public opinion polls on climate change that have been conducted over the last 20 years. He will be looking at results of news surveys documenting change over time in public perceptions and the causes of the trends that he is seeing. He will also be providing us information on state-by-state breakdowns of public opinion, as well as looking at analysis of global warming on voting in the 2012 elections. And he is also going to talk a little bit about public support, about government action aimed at both mitigating and also in terms of new work that he has just completed with regard to adapting to climate change. How do we become more resilient? What are people's views on this? What are we seeing? Dr. Krosnick has been studying American political attitudes for 30 years. He is a world-recognized expert. And we have been privileged to have worked with him a few other times in terms of his speaking and bringing information about these really, really important issues to a policy audience. John? Thank you very much, Carol. And thank you all for coming. It's a privilege to be back in this building. I want to thank EESI for the invitation to present and to thank you for taking time out of your afternoon to hear a new story about where Americans are and their thinking about climate change and their looking at the future on this issue. You can see here on the screen, if you can make out the screen, the cosponsors of our research over the years. They include my universities, including Stanford University, news media organizations, federal government agencies, and the work that I'll tell you about draws on funding from all of those various sources. Today is a smorgasbord or a buffet or something like that where you're going to get little tastes of discussions of a variety of issues, in particular six of them. We're going to begin by talking about how Americans' core beliefs about climate change have been changing in recent years. And as Carol mentioned, I'm going to be talking about a very large meta analysis that has looked at many, many polls to put that in some context. Then we'll talk about state-by-state breakdowns of opinion. We'll talk about Americans' perceptions of what Americans think to see how well we understand our opinions on this issue. We'll look at voting in the 2012 election and the impact of Superstorm Sandy on all of these things. So let's begin here with the fundamentals. Do Americans think the planet has been warming? Do they think warming has been caused by humans? Do they think it's a threat? And so I'm going to show you our time series over many years using this question. You may have heard about the idea that the world's temperature may have been going up slowly over the past 100 years. What's your personal opinion on this? Do you think this has probably been happening or do you think it probably has not been happening? And if you think just for a moment about your impression of American public opinion, what numbers would you expect to be saying probably happening? These are the results. So starting in 1997, we saw 79% saying so this number went up to a peak in 2007 of 84% went down, up, down, and very recently it's back up again. These are huge numbers, of course. And as you can see, they contradict any claims that Americans have turned away from this issue in large numbers. They still believe warming has been happening. Now this finding is not unique to us. I want to talk for a moment about a report put out by the strategy team, which is a group of psychologists in Columbus, Ohio. This report called Assessing Survey Evidence regarding American public opinion data about climate change. And I want to show you just a small excerpt of this. What they did was a meta-analysis of 150 different survey questions asked by every organization they could find doing scientific, representative, national sampling of Americans over a long period. They got the original data from as many of these surveys as they could to compute their own statistics from them. And I'm just going to show you one little piece of their results showing you the measurements of beliefs about the existence of warming. Has the planet been warming? And here it is. So each dot is a survey number down across the bottom of the years going from 1986 to 2012. This is the percent of Americans, excuse me, measured to be indicating that they thought the planet had been warming. And you can see, first of all, there's tremendous distribution of these dots, dispersion of them across a large range. So if you want to find a survey that reports 45% believing this, you can. If you want to find a survey that's reporting 90%, you can. So you might look at those numbers and say, oh, geez, how could surveys be reliable? How could they be believable if they produce such a wide range of results? But that's actually the wrong conclusion to reach. The important thing I want to show you, though, is that our number at about 75% right now is kind of in the middle of this pack here. We're not unusually high and we're not unusually low. Now, why is it that there would be that dispersion? Well, the reason is because survey question wording matters. Different survey organizations ask differently phrased questions and they get different results. So now what I'm going to do is show you another table from the strategy team's report. This one connects the dots that were produced by the same question, even if you ask by different organizations. And if you look here, what you can see here, for example, is a line up at the top of a question asked by the Gallup organization. And when we connect these dots, you can see that they are quite consistent over time. Here's another question asked at the bottom by NBC News and The Wall Street Journal. These numbers also fairly consistent over time. You can see all of them show a small decline in this time region and then they sort of all are disrupted in the last couple of years, some going up, some going down in different directions. The important point I wanted to make here is just simply that when you look carefully at these data, you see two things. One is that our numbers are not unusual. They're in about this range with others. And secondly, there has been no dramatic falloff in public belief in this issue. It's not like the public has turned away. Now let me go back for a quick second. If you look at our numbers, you will see this increase from 75 to 83, then a drop to 73, and an increase back up to 78. You might think that is what we call random measurement error, that there will be some looseness to each measurement. But in fact, it's not that. Let me show you what's going on. That this graph divides the American public into two parts, the blue line at the top between 2006 and 2012, is people who report high trust in climate scientists. These people show remarkable stability of their views over time, and it's because the message they get from natural scientists hasn't changed much. This line, the red line, is the beliefs of people who are low in trust in natural scientists. And you can see they're the folks who show a sharp drop in 2009, an increase and then a drop again. And what I wanted to illustrate for you is that this red line correlates in its movements almost perfectly with this green line. And what the green line is, as you can see on the right hand side, is its average world temperature the year before the survey number. So what's happening? Those low trust people say, well, I can't figure out if the planet is warming by listening to scientists. I've got to figure it out some other way. And the way they figure it out, it appears, is by looking at newspaper headlines, television, radio, and so on, when, as you know, there's tremendous publicity for the fact that, for example, 2010 was the warmest year on record in history, 2008 was tied for the coolest year in a 10-year period, and so on. And so there's no surprise here that this number drops a lot among the low trust people because they're aware that the prior year's temperature for the world as a whole was unusually low. Now the natural scientists would say to you, this is the last thing you should do. You should not pay attention to last year's temperature in order to infer warming or cooling over 100-year period. But in fact, that's what these folks feel they have no choice but to do. So what we can predict is, as world temperature goes up and down, as we know it will from year to year, their opinions will vacillate as well. But to see a decline like this, even a sizable one among them doesn't mean we're running off a cliff. Let me show you a few other pieces of evidence to indicate that there is no cliff running off of. This is a question about human action. If the question says, if the Earth's temperature has been warming gradually over the last 100 years, do you think it's caused mostly by things people have done, mostly by natural processes or about equally by both? And you can see that number started at 80% in 2006. It remains at 77% today. No huge drop off by any means. When we put these two together, the planet has been warming and it's been caused by humans. This number, the joint number started off at 70%. It's at 62% today. It's been relatively stable in these recent years. Some people define climate change as this conjunction and that gives you a sense of it. We did ask people, do you think if the Earth's temperature increases by five degrees Fahrenheit over the next 75 years, would this be good, bad, or neither good nor bad? And you can see that that number holds steady as well, started at 60% and today it's at 53%, no dramatic change. Okay, now, these are the beliefs that people express. Social psychologists are particularly sensitive to the fact that you might express a belief but not hold that belief with a great deal of certainty. And if you think about books like Merchants of Doubt that have been proposing the possibility that there have been campaigns to convince Americans that we don't know about these things to reduce their certainty, then you might imagine we would see a drop in confidence in these opinions over time. We do not see that. Here are the percent of people who, when we ask them how sure are you about whether the planet's been warming. The percent of people who put themselves at the top two points, extremely or very sure, has actually, if anything, increased slightly after being quite steady over this time period. There's no evidence that people are less confident in those views and I thought I would just show you here the percent of the nation who are extremely or very sure that the planet has not been warming. These are the passionate skeptics. They started off at 5% in 2006 and in our latest measurement, they are 5%. Asking people, do you think the federal government should do more than it's doing now, less than it's doing now or about what it's doing now on this issue? You can see that in the late 90s about half of the country thought the government should do more. Starting in 2006, those numbers were higher at the end of the Bush administration. During the Obama years, they have been holding steady at about 60%. Okay, that brings us to the end of part one. Here's what I hope you got from that. First of all, large and in some cases, huge majorities endorsing the existence, causes, and threat of climate change and no real significant movement, either in our surveys or in anybody else's. Ours are not outliers, ours are in the middle of the pack. What matters is question wording. Different organizations get different results depending upon wording, but the message, I think, is clear. Okay, part two. When I've been to the Hill in the past and shared results of our surveys with representatives in the House and the Senate, one of the messages I got over and over was these national surveys you've been doing are lovely, but they don't help me because I need to know about my state or my district. And for me, that was, I'll admit to you, a horrifying revelation because I thought I was in the business of helping government, but I realized that I and my colleagues were kind of making news, but we weren't really providing the information that legislators need. And after a series of those conversations, I was in the taxi going to the airport very sad, and when I realized, oh, wait a second, I can actually address this issue because I've done many surveys, as I've shown you, over a period of 15 years, each one with a sample of at least 1,000 respondents. And if I stack up all of those surveys, I have many thousands of people who I can then slice up into the states from which they come. You now see there's been almost no movement in these opinions over that time, so we can put them together and generate a portrait of the country. So I'm now gonna show you a series of maps that put together all of our percentages for each of these states and to look at the answers that we get to each of these questions I've shown you so far. So let's start with the first one. Has the planet been warming gradually over the last 100 years? So the first thing that I wanna point out is these gray states up here, it's not that we don't love them, it just turns out putting together all of the data did not give us enough respondents in those states to give us confidence in producing a measurement. So you'll just need to ignore those. If you look over here at the legend, what you'll see is that as the state gets darker green, that's a larger and larger majority believing in the existence of climate change. And you'll see here in the legend, the smallest number is 65%. What that means is we cannot find a single state in which a majority of the residents are skeptical about long-term warming. Now, if you look closely, you'll see that some of these numbers are on the lower end in the 60s and some of them are on the higher end. I wanna point out one in particular, wherever this is right here, Oklahoma. I don't know if you can see it. The number there is 85% believing in the existence of warming. That's one of the largest numbers in this table. Also, New York at 81% is another high number as well. The lower numbers are not, I mean, Texas is at 80, but the range is fairly consistent in the 70s and the other states. So that's the first one. Here's the second one. Has human action been causing warming? Again, darker states are greener in the sense of attributing more responsibility to human action. And the important thing to see here in the legend is the lowest number is 66%. Again, there is not a single state in the country where a majority of people believe that warming is purely natural. I'll let you digest it for a second, but we can't do it too long because I wanna show you the next one. This is the conjunction of the two as warming been happening and is human action responsible. So the smallest number here is 54, the largest up in the 80s. Again, no state majority on the skeptical side. Here is whether five degree warming over 75 years would be bad. And I've circled the two states here in this graph, the only two where a majority say it would not be bad. Either they say it would be neither good nor bad or they say it would be good. And those two states, Utah and Nevada, as you can see, are just barely under 50%. The rest are on the other side. Would global warming be a highly serious problem? The smallest number we have in this graph is 52%. The largest number in the low 80s. Notice, for example, Colorado at 87. So I'm showing you a lot, but in a sense it's a simple take home from each one. And here's another one. Should the federal government do more to deal with climate change, do less or do about what it's doing now? I've circled only Utah here where just a bare majority of people do not support more government action. Majorities in all the rest of the states do support increased government action. Should the federal government limit greenhouse gas emissions by businesses? This question, you see a lot more gray states here. We haven't asked this question in as many surveys, so we are more limited. And again, a very large number in Colorado, 84% up near the maximum. The lowest number here in this is 70%. And this is quite a remarkable statement, right? Because you can't get 70% favoring government restricting business emissions without a lot of Republicans favoring it in addition to independence and Democrats, which is the case. Favoring cap and trade. Again, a question we haven't asked in enough surveys to cover a lot of states, but this movement from 52% at a low up to 78%, again, not a single state on the skeptical side. Increasing federal taxes on gasoline. And let me just tell you how the question is worded. Do you think the federal government should increase taxes on gasoline in order to cause people to use less of it? So many economists have recommended this as a good policy. If you want people to use less, just jack up the price. But imagine if people, somebody said to you, would you mind if I reach in your wallet, take out money? I'm not gonna tell you what I'm gonna do with it. And the purpose is simply to manipulate your behavior. Doesn't sound so great. In fact, we couldn't find a single state where a majority favor it. This is very unpopular. We asked a series of questions about federal policy, either requiring with mandates or providing tax breaks to companies to, for example, utilities to produce more electricity with water, wind, and solar power. The smallest majority we see here is 67%. There's not a single state where a majority is opposed to this. Again, interestingly, Colorado had a big number, Texas as well. Requiring or offering tax breaks to car companies to build all electric cars. The low is 55% in favor. The high is 81%. Requiring or offering tax breaks for power plants to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The smallest majority 55, up to 81. You get the idea. So I'm not gonna go through all these. But this is, I think, perhaps one of the most interesting ones. This is the percent of people who say the issue of climate change is extremely important to them personally. This is the group of people who we refer to as the climate change issue public. The people who are passionate, they wake up every morning and they say, today is another opportunity to influence government on climate change. These are the people who vote based on the issue. And so you can see in what states the largest concentrations are. So the maximum here is 24%. Some of the darker states are New Mexico, California, Nevada, Kentucky. But there is a presence in every state of people voting based on this issue. Okay, that's the end of that part. So take home messages. The greenness I showed you in part one is remarkably evenly distributed across the country. There is variation, but there is no state where there is a pocket of skepticism that outweighs the majority on the green side. So maybe that's news to you. I would think it might be because I don't know of any other source of data that would tell you what the states individually think about this issue. And for people working in this building, this would be useful information, presumably, to think about your constituents. Now, if legislators are in touch with their constituents already, there's no news here. But it occurred to me that there might not be that connection between legislators and their constituents because of the conversations that I had, which led me to ask this question, how well do Americans understand what Americans think on this issue? So I've shown you what our measurements have suggested. If we were to ask people, what do you think Americans think? What would we get? So I'll tell you the results from a telephone survey that we did last summer with random digit dialing to landlines and cell phones. So the country is represented here. And we asked people this abbreviated version of our existence question, what's your personal opinion? Do you think that the world's temperature probably has been going up slowly over the past 100 years or not? And then we said, now I'd like to ask you about other Americans' opinions on the issue of global warming. First, about what percent of American adults would you guess believe that the world's temperature has been going up slowly over the past 100 years? You can answer with a number between zero and 100%. So we're seeking to find out how close people are to that number about 75 that I showed you earlier. Now, it turns out that there is research and psychology showing that when you ask for percentage estimates like this, a chunk of people who say 50% really do mean half the country. But another chunk of those people are saying, I don't know. This is their coin flip. It could be either way, I don't know. So what we did was to follow up with those people and ask them, did you say 50% because you think about half of American adults believe that or did you say 50% because you're not sure how many American adults believe that? And then among the people who chose the latter option we asked them, if you were to guess how many American adults believe that the world's temperature has been going up slowly over the past 100 years? And we made it a little easier for them by giving them five choices. And when we put these numbers all together, I'll show you results in a moment, but we followed up with exactly the same questions about American adults who call themselves Republicans and American adults who call themselves Democrats. So we're asking what percent of those two groups do you think hold this belief? So let me first of all remind you of Americans' own beliefs and the breakdown by party. So all Americans, as I showed you, 73% think the planet's been warming. When we split it by Democrats, independents and Republicans, we see this. So on the right hand side, a majority of Republicans, 57% believe the planet's been warming, 71% of independents and 86% of Democrats. This is a partisan gap, I'll call it of 29 percentage points between these two bars. Now, what about Americans' perceptions? How close do they come to those numbers? So first of all, they don't say 73%. On average, they say 56%. In other words, on average, people perceive the country to be about evenly split on this issue. And we asked then about Democrats, that number is only 64%, much lower than I showed you a moment ago. And when we asked about Republicans, that number is much lower than I showed you before, only 44%. Here, the partisan gap now, only 20 percentage points. So I'm gonna put these two next to each other for a second, but I just want you to see that the partisan gap people perceive is only two thirds the size of what actually exists. But now what I'm doing is putting all these bars next to each other. So you can see how much people are underestimating the greenness of the country as a whole, the greenness of Democrats, and the greenness of Republicans. So on the one hand, people are underestimating greenness. At the same time, they're underestimating partisan division. Now, what about perceptions of Democrats divided up? So you might imagine that since Democrats are Democrats, they might know their group better than independents or Republicans would. But that's not true. It turns out basically everybody gets it about equally wrong. The right answer is way up here, but all Americans are averaging 64, Democrats themselves are only slightly more accurate, it's 68, these numbers are essentially flat. So it's not the case that people know their own group better than the other group. And this same thing is true in perceptions by Republicans. So I told you already that 44, excuse me, perceptions of Republicans, so 44% on average Americans believe that Republicans favor this, and it turns out across these three groups, whether you're asking Democrats or independents or Republicans, they all get it wrong by about the same amount, this number is considerably higher, and each group is underestimating. So again, no evidence that a party knows its own members better than members of another party. So the conclusion to take from this part is the country really doesn't know how green it truly is. Is that a barrier for legislators? If legislators share that misunderstanding, I don't know if they do, I've never done a survey of legislators or their staffs, but if that misperception in the general public is shared here, then that might be an explanation for decisions on policymaking. Okay, now the next chapter is on the 2012 presidential election. We have done a series of studies looking at the 2008 presidential election and the 2010 congressional elections using a variety of different methods to assess the impact of climate change opinions on voting. And the theory we bring to this harks back to what I said earlier on issue publics. So in political science, what we know is the vast, if you take any one issue, like gun control or abortion, the vast majority of Americans do not feel strongly about it and they do not use it as a basis for voting, even if there's been a ton of news coverage about that issue recently. People tend to vote based on the issues they do care about and people care about a variety of different issues, each one attracting the passions of a relatively small segment of the country. And in this case, I showed you the sizes of the issue publics in the various states. They're in general sort of in the 10% range these days, although some as large as 20 and some as small as two. The hypothesis we would offer is that among those passionate people in 2012, votes might have moved in toward a particular candidate as a result of those individuals' preferences. So on most issues that have longstanding controversy behind them, gun control, abortion, race relations and others, on those policy issues, the issue public, the passionate people are typically about evenly split, about as many people favoring strong gun control laws as opposing strong gun control laws. But climate change is different. We have been amazed to see over time that about 90% of the passionate people on this issue are on the green side. So what that says is if our theory is right and a candidate stakes out a green position on climate, the vast majority of those passionate people will be attracted in the direction of that candidate. And if instead a candidate expresses skepticism about climate, then that may lead people away from that candidate. Now you know that during the 2012 campaign, especially at the very end, Barack Obama was explicit in his belief in the existence of climate change and the need to address it. Mitt Romney had been over a period of time skeptical about it and opposed government action in some ways. So you can imagine that sets up the possibility that issue public members would be attracted to the president as a result. So we asked a series of questions. This is one of the studies we've done. I only have time for the one. This done in June 2012, again a random digital telephone survey of a representative sample of Americans called on landlines and cell phones. We asked people, first for their own opinion, how much do you think the US government should do about global warming? A great deal, quite a bit, some a little or nothing. Then we asked about how much government do you think, excuse me, how much government action does Barack Obama want on global warming and how much government action does Mitt Romney want on global warming? And lastly, how much do you think the US government is doing now to deal with global warming? And what we do is we take answers to these questions and we put them into a high tech statistical analysis predicting answers to this question. If the presidential election were being held today and the candidates were Barack Obama the Democrat and Mitt Romney the Republican, for whom would you vote? Now these names are in parentheses because each respondent is randomly assigned either to hear Obama's name first and Romney second or to hear Romney's name first and Obama's second to control for order effects. And we allowed people to volunteer that they would vote for someone else or to say that they would not vote at all. The statistical analysis includes as predictors the proximity to the candidate of the voter on what should be done about warming. That is, which candidate are you closer to? Are you closer to Obama or are you closer to Romney and by how much? And we controlled for party identification, liberal conservative ideology and a variety of demographics. And we estimate this model using a series of different statistical techniques including multinomial logistic regression and multinomial probit. These are both legitimate techniques. It turns out we get the same results either way. We also used a variety of issue congruence measures for those of you who are really into this literature. There is disagreement among political scientists about what's the right way to compute these statistics. So we did all of them. And we get the same story about registered voters from every analysis and it's right here. And I don't ask you to actually understand this. I only want you to look at the very top row and to see a series of coefficients. So this is measures using one method measures using a second method measures using a third method and these negative coefficients right here with asterisks on them tell you the following story. That the greener the voter was on climate the more government action he or she wanted in this case the more likely that person was to vote for Mr. Obama the less likely that person was to vote for Mr. Romney the less likely that person was to vote for somebody else and the less likely that person was to not vote at all. So in other words the idea is by being green it appears that Mr. Obama not only took votes away from other candidates but he actually inspired people to vote who would not otherwise have voted. Now in this graph which I also don't expect you to understand we add for the statistical mavens interactions and in this case between passion and issue congruence on climate. And if you look across this row you see lots of asterisks as well with negative coefficients. What that means is that the effect I just showed you is concentrated only among the voters who are passionate about the issue. Makes sense right? People who don't care about it don't use the voting that is a basis to vote but these folks do. This is a bit of evidence of the validity of our findings. Okay so that end of that part now we come to the last part. What's the takeaway from the last part? Candidates in this particular race gained by being green on climate and lost by being skeptical. Finally the impact of Superstorm Sandy. You know that the community concerned about climate change in recent years has moved toward frequent discussions of extreme weather events. And in some organizations there is the presumption that if we illustrate for Americans that storms are happening more frequently, they're more severe. Sandy being an example of it. If we have floods and droughts in other locations more of these extreme weather events this will have impact on people's thinking about climate change. So we investigated this and let me tell you how I'll tell you our hypotheses and our findings. So when something like Sandy happens and it looks like there might be the potential for it to have impact on public opinion. People like me usually are just frustrated and disappointed and sad. Because it's easy to do the survey afterwards to find out what people think. And you just sit around saying, oh, if only I had done a survey before then I could compare the before to the after. So amazingly enough, Beaumakines and I were involved in a project not inspired by Sandy, begun many months before where we had a long questionnaire about climate change that was being fielded right before and right after Sandy hit by six different survey companies. And so we had thousands of interviews done coincidentally to allow us to bracket this event. These are all internet surveys and I wanna be clear with you, these are non-probability samples. So there are many companies in the country that are providing internet data to academics, to businesses and they're not taking random samples of the country. What they do is they put out ads saying, would you like to do surveys for a little money? Sign up here and then these samples are people who sign up are then invited to do surveys. This is a project evaluating that data method. But what we know is that the methods were constant across this time period. So we can look at these groups to see if there is change. Now the demographics of these groups depart from the country in some ways. So we did a standard mathematical procedure of waiting which adjusts the demographics to look like the country. When Sandy hit the US, three survey firms had been interviewing for a while and within the days after Sandy, other three other survey firms began to collect data. All of the interviewing I'm gonna show you was done before the election. So there were 2,070 interviews done before Sandy and 2,891 done afterwards. And we're using what we call technically a regression discontinuity design, controlling for demographics and controlling for differences between the survey companies. So let's talk about hypotheses. What impact might Sandy have had on how Americans think about this issue? Well, one possibility some people have voiced is that perhaps seeing this severe storm would convince skeptics that global warming has actually been happening. So you could think for a minute. Would that be a logical reaction to a severe storm? Maybe. Secondly, maybe seeing a severe storm would convince people that global warming is causing more storms. But would it really? I mean it's a storm. Did we see from this storm that global warming caused it? Maybe, maybe not. Is it possible that Sandy caused people to believe that global warming is a more serious problem? Well, if they didn't know that there are serious storms like this and then they see how serious it is, maybe that would be news if they link it to climate change. Let's see, I'm sorry, this is going, oh. There we go. And one more, sorry. Did it lead people to believe that government should take more action on the issue? Maybe, let's find out. So here are the first results. This is the question of do you think the planet has been warming gradually over the last 100 years? Would a severe storm convince you that that's true? Well, it turns out it didn't. These bars going downward with negative numbers on them indicate to you reductions in the percent of people who believe this, afterwards as compared to before. Here's the country as a whole. There's a non-significant 4% drop here. So that is not a real change in this number. We divide it up by Democrats, non-significant 2% drop. Republicans, non-significant no drop. Independence, a 6% drop, which is not significant, that's not real. The only instance in which we find a statistically significant drop is among people who live in the states where Sandy hit. The people who actually experienced the damage afterwards were less likely to say the planet's been warming over the last 100 years. You will notice there is not a single statistically significant upward pointing bar here. Sandy did not increase endorsement of the existence of climate change in the past. Interestingly though, when we ask people, do you think the planet will warm gradually in the future if nothing is done to prevent it? There's again, no change for the country as a whole, a negative 2% for the country as a whole, no significant differences across here up, except look over here. These are people who said they don't think climate change has been happening in the past. Among those people who you might call the skeptics, there is in fact a 17 percentage point increase in the percent of them who think that warming will happen in the future if unchecked. Does it matter? Guess what? This is a tiny group of people. It's about 20% of the country. This is less than 20% of 20%. And that's why this number doesn't even notably go up. There are non-significant decreases in other groups. The net result of this event for the country as a whole is no change despite that 17 percentage point increase. Is it a fluke? No, it turns out it shows up in other measures as well, though not significant here. So will 15, excuse me, five degree Fahrenheit of warming in the future be bad? No change at all. We watch a serious storm and it does not, for the country at all, change the proportion of people who say it would be bad. You can see there are no asterisks here. There is a 12 percentage point increase, but non-significant among the non-believers, I cannot reject the hypothesis that that is zero from these data. But we do see a significant change here. Let me get there. So the question here is, will global warming be a nationally serious problem in the future? No net change, a significant decrease for Democrats. Again, we see a 16 percentage point increase among the skeptics. So 16% of 20% coupled with everybody else equals nothing happening for the country as a whole. Will global warming be a globally serious problem? Again, no net change for the country, but that group of skeptics see an increase. But remember, I've got to tell you an important thing about the wording of these questions. These folks here who have said to us, I don't think it's happening. When we ask them this question, do you think it'll be a globally serious problem? We begin it by saying, assuming it is happening. Because otherwise we can't ask the question, right? Because we can't say how serious would something you think doesn't exist be. So we've got to say, assuming it's happening. So they say, yeah, I mean, if it is happening, I guess I think it's more serious, but I don't think it's happening. There you have it. Okay, one more example. Is global warming causing more storms? Only that group shows a significant increase, 17% of 20%, no net increase for the country as a whole. Here's a really striking finding. Should the federal government take substantial action to address climate change, look at all of these significant downward red bars. After this storm hit, the country was less supportive of government mitigation efforts. And the drop is the biggest among Democrats and independents. There's actually an increase among Republicans. Among the people who were in the Sandy affected states, the largest decrease of 13 percentage points. So if there is a notable change, it is a sense in which maybe this is New York and New Jersey and Connecticut's problem, it's not the country's problem. And the last one I wanna show you is the size of the issue public, the amount of personal importance that people attach to the issue. Wow, a seven percentage point drop from before to after. So we have the drop being concentrated among Democrats, among people who were distracted otherwise by Sandy and among people who believe in climate change. So if anything, this would suggest that people were transformed from thinking about this issue in a way that they no longer attached the significance to it, that would lead them to vote on this basis. So putting all that together, it's pretty hard to say that those who believe in event like this will push the country in a green direction, can see support for it. Okay, so let me summarize, effects of Sandy. At first glance, it seems that Sandy led skeptics to endorse the existence and threat of global warming, but these people think it's not actually happening. The survey question begins assuming it's happening. And so therefore, their increase is likely to be inconsequential. And among people who believe that global warming has been happening, Sandy did not increase perceived seriousness and it did not increase their perceptions that global warming was causing storms. Most importantly, Sandy inspired desire for less federal action and a reduction in the personal importance of the issue. For those who believe extreme weather is the ticket to Americans recognizing the seriousness of this problem, you can't look at these data to see support for that. Okay, so this brings us to the end of our Schmorgers board buffet. Let me summarize what I hope you have from this set of updates. One is I hope you have a sense that the country is and remains remarkably green on this issue according to many measures, that the greenness varies from state to state, but we could not find a single state that already is skeptical on this issue. No doubt however, to the extent that legislators want to pay attention to their constituents' views, some legislators are getting a stronger green signal than others and it'd be interesting to look at these maps as a way to, if you work here, to help your members think about their constituents. I've shown you also that events like Hurricane Sandy did not increase belief or concern, but I've shown you that the issue was of significant passion enough for people in 2012 that had influenced their voting in that election. And I've shown you that the findings I'm sharing with you here are not only unique to our survey group, they are kind of in the middle of the pack of many different organizations' questions on this issue. Okay, that brings us to the end of our presentation. I think somebody could probably turn the lights on and we can do questions. Thank you. And that was quite a trip to a lot of material, so I am fascinated. Any questions or comments? Probably from the U.S. National Act or two of the survey designers who take care of this, but even in random digit dialing schemes, I would have assumed that the urban areas would respond in higher, about, just because of where people live, you're going to, sorry, right? So, yes, the question was, so even in random digit dialing schemes, I would assume that most of your survey responses came from urban areas, and so does that affect how you might weigh the answers, or because, again, going back to, if you are a staffer here working for your boss, they have different districts. I mean, there are some folks who live in, you know, some constituents who are in really urban areas and some constituents who are in rural areas, and so what would you predict from your, assuming that you can predict anything from your survey, what would you expect the pattern to be based on the kinds of responses that you're getting? Yeah, so does everybody understand why I'm smiling at this question? Last time I went to the airport, I was sad because I didn't have state-level data. Now I'm sad because I don't have congressional district-level data. I give you one thing, you need something smaller. I can only do so much for you. I'm on the house side. Yes, I'm well aware I'm on the house side. So, you are raising a really interesting question. Is there geographic variability? You're proposing in particular the idea that maybe urban respondents are different from rural respondents. That's a reasonable hypothesis. And I have to tell you, I cannot answer that question. I do not have data that allow me to parse up the states into districts. I could certainly pursue your hypothesis. I could compare people who live in highly dense urban areas to people who live in more sparse rural areas. And now that you ask me, we will do it. And next time I come back, I'll tell you the answer. And that might be a handle toward moving you a little bit toward understanding, perhaps, distinctions between congressional districts. But I will tell you, to any way, a step ahead of you, we actually are planning to do some congressional district surveys, not a lot. But we are planning to do some soon. And we'll start to find whether there are those kinds of pockets. Thank you. Hi. My name is Yoni Ben-Stock. I'm the founder of Climate Scores, which is a website that creates congressmen on climate change. My quick question is, why do you think Americans were less likely to believe in climate change after the hurricane? It's understandable why they'd be less likely for government regulation versus the state, but why would they less likely believe in climate change after the hurricane? Yeah. So first of all, you're certainly right. That is, there's a hint of that. Let's actually look back here. Let's see. So has global warming been happening? That negative four over there on the left-hand side, that's not a real change for the country as a whole. But you're right that the people in the sandy affected states did drop. And when we look at the future, there really is no movement downward in the vast majority of these groups. So your question is quite a reasonable one. Why is it that that drop happened? And I have no answer to it, but I am willing to speculate in this case, as long as you realize it's a complete speculation, wild guess. That one possibility is that in situations like that, when you're right in the center of the action, there is nonstop news coverage about this issue. And when there is nonstop news, assuming you've got electricity and you can watch it or hear it or read it, the question is, how do you fill 24-7 with a hurricane? And one of the ways you fill 24-7 with a hurricane, I suspect, is bringing in natural scientists to talk about it. And one of the messages I predict was probably prominent. Was scientists being asked, was this because by climate change? And them saying, I don't know. I can't tell you for any single storm that it was caused by climate change. That these storms happen, climate change, we believe, will make them more frequent and more severe. But I can't tell you this one is the result of that. And if you hear that message, maybe that creates some degree of skeptic. But it's just my guess. Is there one in the back? Because, well, oops, sorry. Actually, if you put your hands up and she sees you, then she'll know where to take the mic. Thank you. Gabriel Marty, I wanted to ask you a question. Did you fall about matching media coverage about climate change towards the evolution of Americans' belief in climate change to try to explain that? Yes, I love that question, too. In fact, a team of four Stanford students last summer took that exact project on. They drew random samples of news coverage, newspaper stories, television stories, over the 15-year period of our surveys. Because you can't read every one of those stories, but you can draw a representative sample of the stories and read them. About each story, I think they answered 39 questions about the story. Did it say this? Did it say this? Did it say this? They did statistical analysis to look at the degree to which media coverage changing over time predicted the kinds of changes that I showed you earlier. And the answer is, for the vast majority, it did not, that movement up and down in the content of media coverage was actually remarkably small, that you may know that there's a stereotype of media coverage a decade ago that it was striving to be balanced, that there was an attempt at covering the green side of the scientific point of view as well as the skeptical side. And at some point, news reporters realized that they didn't need to do that anymore and they could abandon that desire for balance and just settle on one side. We found almost no evidence of that, that news coverage was leaning on the green side of the issue throughout that time period, but there were small changes in the number of skeptical stories and those changes were the only ones that we saw related to public opinion. So in other words, skeptical news stories were very rare, but when they doubled in size from 5% to 10%, that was coincidental with a small drop in public opinion. So it looks like one possible hypothesis is that there were so many green stories over the years that it was old news to people, that they had heard this before today, it's about butterflies yesterday, it was about bears the day before it was about ice, but it's kind of the same story over and over again. There's nothing new about that. Ooh, really? And a skeptical story, an entirely skeptical story, that's unusual, that stands out and when it doubles in size, it's notable, even if it's a small number. So it did look like those small numbers might have been consequential, but in very small ways. You saw the numbers are quite stable over time. So in the previous, in the last several years, did you only expect that to have like a huge consequence in American news about change? Right, so now you're shifting from the content of the stories to the number of stories and you're absolutely right that in 2007, there were a colossal number of news stories about climate change, it's never been anywhere near that since then. And there is a hypothesis in political science that's referred to as the media agenda setting hypothesis, the idea that if the media are dominated by an issue, doesn't matter what it is, Americans will think that's the most important issue facing the country. That did not happen for this issue. Even in 2007, with a colossal number of news stories about it, nobody in America was saying climate change is the most important problem facing the country today, which is our measure. Now, that's not the only measure of belief in the phenomena or support for federal action or even priority because the work of Sam Larson who was an undergraduate at Stanford and is now working here in Washington showed that if you ask this question, what will be the most important problem facing the world in the future? Global warming is number one along with the environment. So that clearly it is a priority for people, it's just not what they consider the most important problem facing the country today. Maybe we should move to the other side someday. Hi, Dave Hawkins, natural resource at Defense Council. Nice to meet you. My question is about the Republican response post-Sandy to the two future oriented questions. And I believe that you showed that a general question about whether it will happen in the future had a drop in Republican belief. And then what seemed to be a contradict that one, yes. And then the next one was, will it be globally serious? And then you had an increase in Republican belief. And I wonder if you could comment on those two. Yeah, that's not a drop. It looks like a drop. It says minus nine, but there's no asterisks. So I cannot reject the hypothesis that that is zero. And I wouldn't want you to reject that hypothesis either. So let's look at the other one globally serious. So there's a 9% no asterisk. So you're right. It wouldn't make much logical sense except they're really both zero. Thank you. Should we shift over? Shift to the left. Yes. My name is Christine Driscoll and I work for a consulting firm called Green Strategies. I wanted to ask about your use of language in the study or just when you're talking about this. A lot of climate scientists say that climate change is a theory the same way that gravity is a theory. But when we hear people talk about it, we hear the word belief a lot which kind of suggests something that's not really grounded in science and it's more of a faithful interpretation of the science. So I was wondering if you think that the use of the word belief kind of colors people's response. And also if you can talk about maybe other language we could use or the kind of languages, the kind of language that politicians use when they talk about climate change. Great, thank you. So let me go back here. Let's see if you might be referring to this. Can you, isn't this fun to see the talk in reverse order at top speed? Okay, so so this says what's your personal opinion, right? It doesn't use the word belief. I use the word belief myself a lot. And you said that that's, it's interesting to think about that if you think about climate change not as something that you can have a belief about but sort of a scientifically proven fact. So let me answer your question this way. I'm a scientist. I don't think there's any such thing as a scientifically proven fact. I think that we use the scientific method to measure and understand the phenomenon we study at any given moment. We're doing the best we can to understand it. But I have lived through many examples where literature said X and sometime later we discovered that the methods we were using were misleading and therefore that not X is right. So I believe in science but I also believe that the scientific process involves sometimes changes of understanding. At one time we thought the sun revolved around the earth and then we learned the earth revolved around the sun. So I'm not here to tell you that anything about science is a proven fact. And I understand not everybody agrees with that but that's, as a scientist, that's my humble view. So having said that, as a psychologist I can tell you that we would unambiguously say a question like this is measuring a belief. It is the perception of the world that the individual holds. Now we could rephrase that. We could call that their agreement with scientists or we could call it agreement with the truth or something of that sort. But for us as psychologists we tend to say here's a question. The planet may have been warming gradually or not. Any individual could say yes or no and we would call that a belief. So am I being responsive to your question? Okay, great, thank you. Hello, my name is Emma Lopez. I'm a fellow with Congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson and my question is in your surveys, do you make a distinction when you're asking these questions between global warming and global climate change or are they used interchangeably? Thank you, I love that question. We published a paper a couple of years ago and a VR and I analyzing data from dozens of countries including the United States, looking at whether people assign different meaning to global warming, climate change, or global climate change. And your two are two out of those three. And the short answer is that we found no notable differences at all in people's reactions to them and the seriousness that they attach to the phenomenon. You could easily imagine that as you know the scientific community used to call it global warming then they shifted over to climate change the goal being to be more scientifically accurate to encompass the many changes it's not just warming, it's many other things. For me personally, I tend to think about this as two separate hypotheses. One is has the earth been warming or not? And secondly, what effects has that warming been happening if it's been occurring in terms of climate? So I would personally view them as separate phenomena and therefore that climate change might be different if it's meant to encompass a lot than simply global warming. As a survey researcher, I believe over the years that the terms are interchangeable in Americans thinking now but that there could easily be misunderstandings in the sense that the phrase global warming sounds like the world getting hotter that is the concept that we're after here. So I feel a little bit safer using that in my own surveys to target that one element of what I'm asking about. But and my concern is that although we've seen no evidence for it if we were to use climate change and people misunderstand that as meaning weather change then we're getting way off track from where we need to be. So I guess I feel like global warming is a more specific and clear reference to the phenomenon of interest and that's why I lean that way but if your question is what difference would it make as far as we can tell not much. Who's got the microphone? Hi, James Hanley with the Carbon Tax Center. I noticed you had a question about policy preferences and you asked about cap and trade where there was a positive response and then you had a gasoline tax. Have you polled on a revenue neutral carbon tax where 100% of the revenue would be returned either through a tax shift or a direct distribution of revenue? So it depends on how you wanna define carbon tax. And in fact, we're working on that right now. I think we will be developing a new question on a carbon tax for our new upcoming survey work. But what I can tell you is we've explored exactly the issue you just mentioned under the more complex rubric of cap and trade. So it's not just a carbon tax but it's got permits and auctioning and all that other baggage. What we found was that mid-60s percent of people favored a cap and trade system when it was described either as auctioning or selling permits to companies for emissions allowing trading and allowing offsets. So we wanted to explore what might be holding that 65% back. In other words, why were people not necessarily accepting this statement and this policy? And so we tried different ways of describing what would happen to the revenue. So we said auction it off, government would get money from companies as a result of that. What if the money were used to support research to protect the environment? That didn't help. What if the money were used to help poor people? No, that didn't help. What if the money were returned equally to all American households? Ah, now that starts sounding better to people. In fact, it increased favoring of the policy by about 10 percentage points. So it looks like a, you can think of it, I don't know if it's revenue neutral but it's a cap and dividend in the sense rather than a cap and trade only. That has been more appealing to Americans. So we will have the answer for you at some time soon when we do our next survey where we will have, I think, a more simple carbon tax description that we'll pursue for the first time. But we haven't done it yet. Good, thank you. One here. You could yell really loud maybe or she'll come quickly. Hi, my name is Adam Bacon. I'm a fellow with the Bacchus office. Very much first, I want to say that I appreciate you used to probe it and lojit regressions. That was a little more statistically significant way of going about things. I'm gonna push you a little bit further. I can understand why you wouldn't do state level analysis. You'd probably lose all statistical significance. Have you considered doing region-specific in order to capture those differences between, for example, the Pac Northwest and the New England type area? Yes, well, so remember bear in mind here we're dealing with one survey now for the 2012 election of a thousand people. So you can do fixed effects for states, you can do fixed effects for regions and you can, all that will do is make these effects more significant, not less significant. And so, that we can do. Well, we can't break it down because we don't have enough cases. But you could certainly look at, if you had a big enough sample, whether that coefficient in the regression equation gets bigger in the greener states in the maps I showed you. That's a very reasonable, interesting question. And we've not been in a position to do it yet, but someday when we have gigantic budgets, we will. Well, I'll do a lot of things with the gigantic. I think we're there. Okay, I want to thank everyone very, very much for being here and I want to thank Professor Krosnick very much for sharing all of this information. There will be a video up on EESI's website so that you will be able to get this information to look at it again, trying to digest it. I'm sure that if you have other follow up questions, please contact us or contact Professor Krosnick or we'll help get you connected. And thank you very, very much for being here. I think this was very, very interesting, fascinating. And we look forward to that next survey. Thanks very much.