America Has the Most Climate Deniers in the West, Survey Finds
Credit to Author: Rob Dozier| Date: Wed, 08 May 2019 17:41:35 +0000
America has the highest rate of human-driven climate change denial in any Western country, according to a new survey.
Thirteen percent of Americans agree with the sentiment that climate change is real, “but human activity is not responsible at all,” according to the survey, The Guardian noted. Of Americans who identified as “very right-wing” to YouGov, 52 percent expressed that they thought global warming was a hoax, a conspiracy theory perpetuated by President Donald Trump.
The US is only led by Saudi Arabia in climate change denial, with 16 percent of respondents from the US ally and the world’s largest oil exporter denying the effects of humans on the climate, and Indonesia at 18 percent, according to The Guardian.
The survey was conducted by YouGov, a data analytics and research firm based in the UK as a part of the YouGov-Cambridge Globalism Project, a collaboration between YouGov, researchers from the University of Cambridge, and The Guardian.
More than 25,000 people across Europe, Africa, Asia and the Americas were surveyed. The research team asked questions about food, travel, technology, immigration, cultural beliefs and the environment to explore global attitudes about populism and globalization.
The consensus among climate scientists is that human-driven climate change is very real. This week, the UN released the summary of a new report that suggested one million different species on Earth are at risk of extinction due to the actions of humans, and that humans are accelerating extinctions at an unprecedented rate.
The news isn’t all bad, though. YouGov found that the majority of people across the world agree that climate change is real, and that humans play a role in causing it, The Guardian noted. Even in America, 40 percent of respondents said humans were at least partly responsible for climate change, and a third said humans were the dominant cause.
It’s a start, but time is running out for the climate.
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This article originally appeared on VICE US.