Next, we're going to talk about climate change literacy. What Americans really know about climate change and its health impacts. There are a number of relevant dimensions to climate literacy and we need to understand all of them in order to communicate effectively. So we need to think about not just what we think that they should know but what they think they already know, what they actually know and what they want to know. So we need to look at all of those. We can't simply focus on what we want them to know. This is a self-assessed knowledge about climate change. I want to point out something about this, these data are from fall of 2008. So they're old, these are decade old data and part of the reason we have not asked these questions again is because what we see here is that the alarmed and the dismissive on all three of these dimensions causes, consequences and ways to reduce the dismissive believe that they are as informed about climate change as the alarmed are. You see the same curvilinear pattern there that we've seen elsewhere. So this is pretty useless actually in terms of assessing what people actually know, back around the time that we first asked this question there was a paper published that said people who know more about climate change are actually less worried about it. When you looked at their measure of knowledge it was self-assessed knowledge. This does not reflect the actual knowledge about global warming. While the data are old, these means, these averages within the segments are likely to have held over the decade that has passed. What has changed is the number of people in each segment. So if I'm in the concerned segment and I learn a lot about climate change and I become more concerned about it, I will move to the alarmed segment, so that the mean for the concerned doesn't change, just the proportion of the population that is in that segment changes. So we can still look at these data as being valid even though they're a decade old, what we need to consider is that these means can change. The means within the segments are unlikely to change. Now, when it comes to actual knowledge, what do people really know? We asked these questions just in March of this year. So these are impacts, and these show us the proportion of people in the nation and in each of the segments who understand that these are impacts of climate change. As you'd expect to see it decreases from the alarmed to the dismissive. We know that that increased global temperatures and glaciers, ice sheets and sea ice decreasing are the two most recognized impacts of global warming. You would think that with the name global warming that everyone would say increased global temperatures, but we still only have three-quarters of the public recognizing that. When we get down to ocean acidification, the proportion is much lower, only just over half. While the alarmed are much more likely to recognize these impacts, when we come to incorrect responses the alarmed are also more likely to think that those are related to global warming, that volcanic eruptions are increasing due to global warming, that acid rain is increasing, the hole in the ozone layer is getting bigger. The alarmed over-generalize in terms of impacts. Here, this is probably the most important of these errors in that it has implications for the kinds of actions that people are taking in order to reduce their carbon footprints. When you think that the ozone layer getting bigger as a result of your aerosol can use is happening then it's not helpful. Now, when we talked about energy conservation a few minutes ago we were thinking about what do people actually know about burning fossil fuels. We asked a series of true-false questions and then as the scale was I believe this is true and I'm certain of it, I believe it's true and I'm uncertain or false uncertain, false certain. What I've translated that into is correct because we have some false statements. Half of the population is sure that burning oil and other fossil fuels produces CO2, a third, that greenhouse gases are like a blanket around the Earth holding in heat, and less than a third that carbon dioxide traps heat in the Earth's atmosphere. So these three comprise the understanding of what happens when we got burned fossil fuels and being aware of all three there aren't that many people who understand all three of those. When we get down here, these are false statements, only a quarter of people, of Americans responded correctly that this statement is false that industrial activities have reduced the concentration of greenhouse gases. This is I think a very consequential one which is if we take action now to reduce future climate change, the climate will go back to normal and we won't have to adapt to any changes in the climate, that is false and a quarter of Americans or it's only a quarter of Americans who understand that that is false. So three-quarters of Americans think that we can make the climate go back to normal if we just reduce our emissions. That's a very consequential misperception that we need to think about addressing. Next, we come to what it is that people want to know, and I want to tell you a little bit about how the questions that I'm going to show you here were developed. Early on in this research program, we asked people, "If you could talk to a climate expert, what question would you most like to ask?" They were open-ended so that we received everybody's responses, and then we went through and coded all of those into categories. These are the categories that we found, and there are a number of them, too many to put on one screen. So I'm showing you here the the top three. The most asked question at this point about climate change is how we know that it's caused by human activities rather than natural changes in the environment. That takes us back to the fact that people do not understand that burning fossil fuels creates CO_2 which acts as a greenhouse gas and warms the planet. Twenty percent of Americans say that is their top question about climate change. I'm sad to see this as the second question, 13 percent of the population wonders if it's too late. Then the third question, this was for researchers at NASA, what kind of research are you conducting? The next five questions were whether it's happening, how do you know it's happening, what can I do to reduce it, what can the US do to reduce it, and what can the nations of the world do to reduce climate change? So we have two about the reality of climate change and three then about solutions to climate change. The least asked questions here, what I want you to notice is among them are the harm questions. Will it harm people? Will it be more harmful or beneficial? What harm will it cause? When you put these together into our key beliefs, combine all of those questions into categories, only nine percent of the population is asking directly about harm. This item isn't more harmful or beneficial I excluded. But if you added that in here, that would bring it up to 11 percent. So people are not asking or eager to ask about the harm that climate change causes. They are much more interested in hearing about solutions. A third of the questions were about solutions, and then the next top category is whether humans are causing climate change. So this tends to be the top question among those segments of the public that aren't really sure what's going on. These questions are from the people who are concerned, who understand that it's happening and really are worried about it. In terms of people not wanting to hear about harm or not eager to hear about harm, we can attribute that to two possible sources. One is that it's still viewed as such a distant risk by so many Americans, and another is fear that I don't want to hear about it. It's probably some combination of those two that is leading to this lack of interest in harm. I divided those top questions and key beliefs by people who say that climate change is happening. It isn't happening, or they don't know whether it's happening. What you can see clearly here is that among those who recognize that climate change is happening, questions about whether we can solve it are the top questions far and away. Among those who say global warming isn't happening, they are equally divided between questions about whether it's happening and whether humans cause it. That is likely to be like, how do you know? That demonstrates the propensity to counter-argue. They want to argue against the evidence. Then among those who don't know, their answers tend to be widely distributed, and there isn't as clear a pattern. These are the people who aren't thinking about the issue and who don't have any real opinions or beliefs about it or really any questions. I think this is mostly random what we're seeing down here. So perceived versus actual knowledge. The Six Americas' self-assessed knowledge follows the same curvilinear pattern as issue involvement. Those at the ends of the scale think they know a lot. Those in the middle think they know less. The alarmed have the highest actual knowledge, but they tend to overgeneralize the impacts of climate change. Half of Americans recognize that burning fossil fuels create CO_2, a third or fewer fully understand the role CO_2 plays in the greenhouse effect, and only a quarter fully recognize that climate change that's currently happening will persist even if we act to mitigate our emissions. In terms of information sought, the single most asked question is how we know that it's human caused. So it's about that relationship between CO_2 and burning fossil fuels and greenhouse gases. So the question is related to their uncertainty about this. If we group by key beliefs, what we see is that the largest category of questions has to do with solutions to climate change. Many people want to hear about solutions, and not so many people want to hear about the harm caused by climate change. That represents then a barrier that we need to overcome when we need to talk to them about the harm that it's going to cause. The most frequently asked question about solutions is whether it's too late and that suggests fear and anxiety which we need to address them by giving people hope with our messages and things that they can do that will make a difference. Finally, that questions differ systematically by recognition that climate change is happening, speaking again to the importance of targeted messaging that addresses the specific audience that you're trying to reach and what they already think and feel.
