Counterintuitive

More Americans Doubt Global Warming

Just 57% believe it's real, down 20 points in 2 years.

Michael Crichton’s legacy lives on. A new survey by the Pew Research Center shows a precipitous decline in the number of Americans who believe in global warming. In 2007, 77 percent of Americans thought that global warming was backed by scientific evidence. Today, it's only 57 percent, with the sharpest drop occurring in independent voters and Republicans. The numbers were released just a week before the Senate begins debating climate-change legislation. In anticipation of that, a handful of scientific organizations have written Congress to confirm that, indeed, global warning is a real phenomenon. How did this happen? An associate director at Pew posits that bigger issues, such as the economy and health-care reform, have taken the spotlight off climate change as of late.