Mind the (Climate) Gap

President Barack Obama may have devoted an unprecedented amount of attention to climate change in his State of the Union address last week, but we still have a long way to go as a country toward accepting the scientific consensus. On Thursday, the Pew Research Center released a comparative survey of scientists and regular people on topics related to science and society. 

Pew analysts quizzed 3,748 members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and 2,002 American adults on their opinions on everything from climate change to vaccines to the U.S. space program. 

Unsurprisingly, climate change was one of the topics of major dispute—87 percent of AAAS scientists say climate change is caused by humans while just 50 percent of the public do. This disparity, of 37 percentage points, made climate change the fourth-most contentious topic on the list (the top was safety of genetically modified foods—88 percent of scientists claim they are safe while 37 percent of the public does). Of course, AAAS scientists study a wide range of topics—among climate scientists specifically, 97 percent agree that climate change is real and human-caused. 

Public acceptance of human-caused climate change has rebounded after dipping in recent years. In 2007, belief that climate change was real and caused by humans was relatively high (77 and 47 percent, respectively), before sinking in 2010 (to 57 and 36), and are now climbing back up (87 and 50). 

Despite this upward trend, climate change denialists appear to be digging in too. Twenty five percent of adults say there is no evidence that the Earth is getting warmer today, up from 11 percent in 2009. 

The clear showing by scientists themselves notwithstanding, the public is split on whether there is a scientific consensus on climate change—just 57 percent of adults said there was scientific consensus. (Remember, 87 percent of scientists in general agree climate change is real and manmade, and 97 percent of climate scientists are on board.)

One issue on which scientists and the public can agree? Both groups say K-12 science, technology, engineering and math education in the United States is sorely lacking.  

Would better STEM education close the gaps between scientists and the general public on polls like this? “Scientists on the whole clearly think that more STEM would help,” Cary Funk, associate director of research for the Pew Research Center, says. “Three quarters of scientists said that too little STEM education is a reason behind the public's limited knowledge of science.”