Globally, 2016 was the warmest year on record, surpassing records set in 2015 and 2014,1 and each new record emphasizes the longer-term upward trend. … Though climate change received little media attention during the 2016 presidential campaign, recent surveys indicate that climate change and related energy issues are taken seriously […] Read more »
Democrats have basic fact problem
We ran a new PredictWise/Pollfish Poll on facts about politics on January 26, 2017 and found that Republican talking points are much more salient than Democratic talking points. This is not a story about partisan asymmetry around what people believe (although that exists), but about how Democrats also believe key […] Read more »
How to Inoculate the Public Against Misinformation About Climate Change
Our article “How to Inoculate the Public Against Misinformation About Climate Change” was published January 23rd, 2017, in Global Challenges: Climate Change. Prior studies have found widespread public misunderstanding about the scientific consensus that human-caused global warming is happening. A series of experiments have also found that simply informing people […] Read more »
Climate Change in the American Mind
Our nationally representative survey conducted shortly after the presidential election finds that the number of Americans “very worried” about global warming has reached a record high (19%), since first measured in 2008. A majority of Americans (61%) say they are “very” or “somewhat” worried about global warming – nearly equal […] Read more »
Rebuilding legitimacy in a post-truth age
The current state of public and political discourse is in disarray. Politicians lie with impunity. Traditional news organizations amplify fact-free assertions, while outright fake news stories circulate on social media. Public trust in the media, science, and expert opinion has fallen, while segregation into like-minded communities has risen. … The […] Read more »
Donald Trump and the Triumph of Climate-Change Denial
Denial of the broad scientific consensus that human activity is the primary cause of global warming could become a guiding principle of Donald Trump’s presidential administration. … Scientific reality does not seem to have escaped the distorting influence of political polarization in the United States. A paper published in Environment […] Read more »