Citation Ballew, M. Project Climate Change in the American Mind. Related Work Publications View All. Search for:. First Name. Job Title. Signup Form Location. The only places that were under 50 percent — Kentucky, North Dakota, West Virginia and Wyoming — are states with deep ties to energy extraction.
It's impossible to know for certain what drove that change, but the extreme weather events of the last few years, from hurricanes and floods to deep droughts and wildfires, might have played a role. Whatever drove the shift, however, those numbers suggest it should be easier for Congress to take action on climate change. Getting people to see the world differently is not easy. That said, there are still some sharp divides in the data when you consider the presidential results.
The percentage believing in human-caused climate change is quite high in states that voted for President Joe Biden last November. The average for those states, 59 percent, is a big number in a country as divided as the United States is right now. Nine of the Biden states are above 60 percent on the question and no state is below 53 percent. Recent climate changes have had widespread impacts on human and natural systems.
The following page lists the nearly worldwide scientific organizations that hold the position that climate change has been caused by human action. The following page contains information on what federal agencies are doing to adapt to climate change. In science, facts or observations are explained by a hypothesis a statement of a possible explanation for some natural phenomenon , which can then be tested and retested until it is refuted or disproved.
As scientists gather more observations, they will build off one explanation and add details to complete the picture. Eventually, a group of hypotheses might be integrated and generalized into a scientific theory, a scientifically acceptable general principle or body of principles offered to explain phenomena.
American Association for the Advancement of Science. Images of Change. The answer is in the science. The CO 2 produced from fossil fuels carries a unique signature that differentiates it from CO 2 produced from other sources. In brief, it carries a specific ratio of carbon isotopes that is only found in the atmosphere when coal, oil, or gas is burned. This information tells scientists that human-caused fossil fuel emissions have been the main contributor to the rise in CO 2 concentrations since the pre-industrial era.
Within the scientific community, there is essentially no disagreement on the causes of climate change. Multiple studies have shown that at least 97 percent of scientists agree that global warming is happening and that human activity is the primary cause. Major scientific assessments also agree. For the warming over the last century, there is no convincing alternative explanation supported by the extent of the observational evidence.
We know that warming and cooling have happened in the past , long before humans were around. However, none of them sufficiently explain the recent, dramatic increase in global temperatures. For that, scientists need to include human influences. Put another way, when climate scientists focus only on natural climate drivers, their models cannot accurately reproduce the observed warming of the past half century.
But when the models also include human-induced climate drivers, they accurately capture recent temperature increases in the atmosphere and in the oceans. In fact, studies show that human activity is responsible for more than half of the warming observed since In recent years, the field of attribution science has become more sophisticated, and scientists are now able to quantify how much more likely an extreme event—such as a heat wave or a massive downpour—was as a result of human-caused climate change.
For example, in a landmark paper , researchers determined that climate change had at least doubled the risk of occurrence of the record-breaking European summer heat wave, which resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of people. A study of the same heat wave concluded that human-caused climate change had increased the risk of heat-related mortality during the event by about 70 percent in central Paris and about 20 percent in London.
Similarly, researchers found that the record-breaking precipitation Texas experienced in during Hurricane Harvey was made three times more likely and 15 percent more intense by climate change. More recently, scientists have found that fingerprinting of climate change can be detected in global daily weather patterns since and yearly patterns since While some types of events are more readily attributable to global warming than others, attribution science is becoming increasingly robust.
Several authoritative scientific institutions and government agencies have confirmed both the rigor and the validity of attributing individual extreme events to human-caused climate change.
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