SAN FRANCISCO, California (ENS) - A majority of Americans agree with most scientists that the Earth is getting warmer, but they are divided over the seriousness of the problem, according to surveys conducted by Jon Krosnick, professor of communication and of political science at Stanford University.
Their uncertainty is based on a belief - shared by two-thirds of the population - that scientists themselves disagree about global warming.
'Americans are very much on the same wavelength with the scientific community about the basics of the issue,' Krosnick said. 'But they lack certainty' about how bad the problem really is.
Krosnick blames this uncertainty on media efforts to give equal weight to opposing sides of the debate. Nevertheless, he said, public consensus is growing that society must tackle global warming.
'The news media have been committed to covering this story in a 'balanced' way,' he said, giving a small minority of scientists who discount the crisis equal play with the '99 percent of experts who agree we have a serious problem.'
Krosnick dubs the result 'balance as bias,' and it leads most Americans to believe that the scientific community itself is divided over this critical issue.
Krosnick detailed his survey findings on Sunday at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science during a symposium titled 'Perception, Persuasion and Climate Change: Can Science Induce Urgent Action?'
To take action on such a huge, complicated issue, Krosnick said, people must believe it exists and will cause severe problems if it is not addressed. But they also must be optimistic that something can be done to alleviate it. 'You have to be certain of these two views,' he said. 'That's where the breakdown comes - certainty for Americans on these issues is either moderate or low.'
Krosnick has three more surveys in progress. They include an update to a joint ABC News, Time magazine and Stanford poll on global warming released last March, which showed that public concern about global warming has spiked over the last decade and that 70 percent of people think global weather patterns have become more unsettled recently.
Krosnick said the new survey results, to be released in April, will gauge how public perception on global warming has changed during the last year.
Second, 'New Scientist' magazine has commissioned a survey by Stanford and the think tank Resources for the Future that will assess how educating people about the cost of addressing global warming affects their support for specific solutions. Survey results will be released May 12.
Finally, Stanford's Woods Institute for the Environment is funding a survey to be released this summer that will look at which effects of global warming the public is most worried about. These include both local effects, such rising sea levels and increased storm activity, and worldwide consequences, such as species extinction.