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Billions of People Have Never Heard of Climate Change

The largest survey of worldwide attitudes towards climate change yet has revealed that billions of people don't even know what it is.

Climate change, for most Americans, is an omnipresent fact of life, at least as an idea. The United States has one of the highest levels of awareness of climate change in the world; over 97 percent, second only to Japan. Whether or not it's understood to be a manmade ecological crisis, according to new Yale research just about every resident of those two countries—along with most of Europe and North America—is familiar with climate change.

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For much of the world, that's not the case. 40 percent of adults around the globe have never heard of climate change.

According to the new study, published in Nature Climate Change, billions of adults are unaware of what many scientists consider to be the gravest wide-scale threat to human civilization. The finding both reflects the science education gap between industrialized and poorer countries—the number one determinant of climate awareness was access to education—and the sinister irony of the climate problem. Rich nations are responsible for the vast majority of greenhouse gas emissions, yet the impacts (sea level rise, drought) are slated to hit developing countries hardest, and in many cases, those most directly in the line of fire aren't even aware of the climatic shift that's putting them in danger.

The researchers pored over the results of a 2007-2008 international Gallup survey on climate change—covering 119 nations and 90 percent of the world's population, it's the largest ever conducted—in order to discern the alarming results.

"Overall, we find that about 40 percent of adults worldwide have never heard of climate change," Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication said in a statement. "This rises to more than 65 percent in some developing countries, like Egypt, Bangladesh and India."

The Gallup results are a little old, you'll notice, but Leiserowitz assures me that they're probably still accurate. "2007-2008 was the high-water mark of global media attention to climate change," he told me in an email. "It dropped precipitously after the financial crisis and recession hit and is only now starting to get back to where we were. So I'd be surprised to find that the numbers overall have changed much."

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The fact that significant majorities in some of the world's largest, fastest-growing nations have not yet learned of climate change may have serious implications for the ongoing drive for international action. Especially because people in those countries tend to be much more open to the concept of climate change than Americans are.

"In the US, people with a very strong ideology of individual freedom over all other values (think Tea Party, Libertarians, John Birch Society, etc.) are often hostile to anything that seems to require government action," Leiserowitz tells me. "It's a big part of what's currently happening within the Republican base [which, of course, overwhelmingly denies climate change is a problem]. You don't find these same political dynamics in most other countries." Other recent research—Leiserowitz examined attitudes towards climate change in India, where a majority are unaware of the phenomenon—has led him to believe that with a little outreach and education, most of the world's adults, unlike US congressmen, will quickly grasp the threat.

"Based on the separate study we did in India, I would rather expect that most people globally are in fact quite open to the concept of climate change—they've just never heard of it before," he wrote me. "Many are witnessing / experiencing changes in local weather patterns, which is often of great concern, especially the many millions who are subsistence farmers."

That means potentially millions more voices calling for action—relatively powerless against the farcical machinations of the science-illiterate Congress in the US, sure, for now—and even more mounting pressure to address what is fast being recognized as a global environmental crisis.

"The results indicate that improving basic education, climate literacy and public understanding of the local dimensions of climate change are vital for public engagement and support for climate action," said Leiserowitz. "In India we found that just a simple description of what climate change is suddenly led to a large majority of respondents (many who were not previously aware of the issue) to say, "yes, that's real".

If only it were that simple with American politicians, too.