Published: April 7, 2015
A global warming public opinion study released Monday shows Washington, D.C. residents worry more about global warming than anyone else in the U.S., though they don’t think it will harm them personally.
According to the study conducted by the Yale Project on Climate Change, 74 percent of D.C. residents are worried about the effects of global warming, but only 47 percent believe they will be personally harmed. D.C. residents even beat out Hawaiians, at 66 percent, in how worried they are about global warming, even though people in the island state likely have more cause for concern.
D.C. beat all other states in the country in most categories covered in the survey, including: the belief that global warming is happening (81 percent), human activities caused global warming (61 percent), global warming will harm future generations (80 percent), and global warming will harm people in developing countries (72 percent), among other things.
The study also showed that D.C. residents overwhelmingly favored enacting regulations to limit CO2 emissions in the country, with 86 percent of people wanting to regulate C02 as a pollutant and 80 percent of people wanting to set strict limits on existing coal-fired power plants. Though, at 77 percent across the country, most people were on-board with funding research into renewable energy sources.
Residents in Indiana, Kentucky, Alabama, Louisiana and Oklahoma all tied for least concerned about global warming, with just 46 percent of residents expressing worry. Those states showed similar numbers in terms of what actions they think should be taken on a national policy level and how much they think humans contributed to climate change.
Authors of the study made all of the data easily accessible in an interactive map where you can break it down into counties and congressional districts to see what each subsection of the population thinks about global warming.
The results of the study came from past global warming surveys when, after compiling the data, the researchers projected it onto a model and broke it down to scale for states, counties and congressional districts. The authors said the results are just estimates of public opinion, not precise measurements, but they conducted multiple tests and compared their model to the results of other independent surveys to conclude their validity.
