Surveys of public opinion

Main article: Public opinion on climate change

The world public, or at least people in economically advanced regions, became broadly aware of the global warming problem in the late 1980s. Polling groups began to track opinions on the subject, at first mainly in the United States. The longest consistent polling, by Gallup in the US, found relatively small deviations of 10% or so from 1998 to 2015 in opinion on the seriousness of global warming, but with increasing polarization between those concerned and those unconcerned.

The first major worldwide poll, conducted by Gallup in 2008-2009 in 127 countries, found that some 62% of people worldwide said they knew about global warming. In the advanced countries of North America, Europe and Japan, 90% or more knew about it (97% in the U.S., 99% in Japan); in less developed countries, especially in Africa, fewer than a quarter knew about it, although many had noticed local weather changes. Among those who knew about global warming, there was a wide variation between nations in belief that the warming was a result of human activities.

By 2010, with 111 countries surveyed, Gallup determined that there was a substantial decrease since 2007–08 in the number of Americans and Europeans who viewed global warming as a serious threat. In the US, just a little over half the population (53%) now viewed it as a serious concern for either themselves or their families; this was 10 points below the 2008 poll (63%). Latin America had the biggest rise in concern: 73% said global warming is a serious threat to their families. This global poll also found that people are more likely to attribute global warming to human activities than to natural causes, except in the US where nearly half (47%) of the population attributed global warming to natural causes.

A March–May 2013 survey by Pew Research Center for the People & the Press polled 39 countries about global threats. According to 54% of those questioned, global warming featured top of the perceived global threats. In a January 2013 survey, Pew found that 69% of Americans say there is solid evidence that the Earth's average temperature has got warmer over the past few decades, up six points since November 2011 and 12 points since 2009.

A 2010 survey of 14 industrialized countries found that skepticism about the danger of global warming was highest in Australia, Norway, New Zealand and the United States, in that order, correlating positively withper capita emissions of carbon dioxide.

Etymology

In the 1950s, research suggested increasing temperatures, and a 1952 newspaper reported "climate change". This phrase next appeared in a November 1957 report in The Hammond Times which described Roger Revelle's research into the effects of increasing human-caused CO₂ emissions on the greenhouse effect, "a large scale global warming, with radical climate changes may result". Both phrases were only used occasionally until 1975, when Wallace Smith Broecker published a scientific paper on the topic; "Climatic Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?" The phrase began to come into common use, and in 1976 Mikhail Budyko's statement that "a global warming up has started" was widely reported. Other studies, such as a 1971 MIT report, referred to the human impact as "inadvertent climate modification", but an influential 1979 National Academy of Sciences study headed by Jule Charney followed Broecker in using global warming for rising surface temperatures, while describing the wider effects of increased CO₂ as climate change.

In 1986 and November 1987, NASA climate scientist James Hansen gave testimony to Congress on global warming. There were increasing heatwaves and drought problems in the summer of 1988, and when Hansen testified in the Senate on 23 June he sparked worldwide interest. He said: "global warming has reached a level such that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause and effect relationship between the greenhouse effect and the observed warming." Public attention increased over the summer, and global warming became the dominant popular term, commonly used both by the press and in public discourse.

In a 2008 NASA article on usage, Erik M. Conway defined Global warming as "the increase in Earth’s average surface temperature due to rising levels of greenhouse gases", while Climate change was "a long-term change in the Earth’s climate, or of a region on Earth." As effects such as changing patterns of rainfall and rising sea levels would probably have more impact than temperatures alone, he considered global climate change a more scientifically accurate term, and like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the NASA website would emphasise this wider context.

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