Imagine you are living on a planet that is exactly like Earth, including the rate of fossil fuel consumption that has occurred since the industrial revolution. What is different on this "Planet B" is that there are no weather observations for examining past and recent climate change, no satellite observations for observing sea level rise, sea-surface temperatures, and ice-sheet changes, and no supercomputers and Earth Systems models for understanding and attributing past climate change.
|Planet B...almost the same as Earth|
Remarkably, more and more people are opting to live on Planet B. As shown in a recent Gallup poll, the percentage of Americans who believe that global warming is real has dwindled, with only 53% agreeing that global warming has begun or will do so in a few years. The percentage of Americans who say that global warming will never happen or will not happen in their lifetime has increased to 19% and 16%, respectively, the former more than double the percentage in 1997.
Fascinating results given the observed changes to the climate system over the past decade.