… Environmentalism in the U.S. used to be a fairly bipartisan issue. The Environmental Protection Agency, founded in 1970, was a product of the Nixon administration. But somewhere around 1990, everything changed. And it changed quickly, in ways that had big impacts on our ability to negotiate international environmental accords […] Read more »
The Consensus on Anthropogenic Global Warming Matters
Skuce et al., responding to Powell, title their article, “Does It Matter if the Consensus on Anthropogenic Global Warming Is 97% or 99.99%?” I argue that the extent of the consensus does matter, most of all because scholars have shown that the stronger the public believe the consensus to be, the […] Read more »
Belief in Creationist View of Humans at New Low
The percentage of U.S. adults who believe that God created humans in their present form at some time within the last 10,000 years or so — the strict creationist view — has reached a new low. CONT. Art Swift, Gallup Read more »
Americans Divided on Whether Recent Science Protests Will Benefit Scientists’ Causes
In the wake of last month’s marches for science and climate in Washington and around the country, Americans are divided in their support of the events’ goals and their sense of whether it will make a difference. In particular, a new Pew Research Center survey finds that most Democrats and […] Read more »
Americans Hold Record Liberal Views on Most Moral Issues
Americans continue to express an increasingly liberal outlook on what is morally acceptable, as their views on 10 of 19 moral issues that Gallup measures are the most left-leaning or permissive they have been to date. The percentages of U.S. adults who believe birth control, divorce, sex between unmarried people, […] Read more »
How Marching for Science Risks Politicizing It
Before the recent March for Science, scholars and journalists debated the likely effect of the protest: Would it defend science against politicization or unnecessarily polarize the public on the value of the scientific enterprise? Some early evidence suggests the march may have widened the divide among liberals and conservatives in […] Read more »