The Washington Post | Emily Guskin, Scott Clement and Joel Achenbach Americans remain shaky on the details of climate science even as they have grown increasingly concerned about human activity warming the Earth, according to a national poll by The Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) that probed the public’s understanding of climate change. The rising alarm is one of the poll’s most dramatic findings. In just five years, the percentage of people calling climate change a “crisis” jumped from 23 percent to 38 percent. More than 3 in 4 U.S. adults and teenagers alike agree that humans are influencing the climate. The overwhelming majority of them said it’s not too late for society to come up with solutions, but a third of adults who say humans are causing climate change don’t think they can personally make a difference, the poll found. The poll suggests that many Americans are early on the learning curve when it comes to knowing what’s causing climate change and global warming. For example, 43 percent of adults and 57 percent of teens cited “plastic bottles and bags” as a “major” contributor to climate change, which is incorrect. That response may echo a recent burst of news media attention to plastic pollution in the oceans.
