The most beautiful words in data journalism — except for free coffee — are longitudinal study.
Polling often obscures more than it illuminates. Questions can be vague or misleading. If you ask, “Do you approve of the president’s handling of immigration?” the respondent will base their answer on whatever they think the president’s immigration policy is. And polls are just a snapshot. With the stock market and egg prices hopping up and down like a rabbit on hot coals, someone’s opinion on the economy may be out of date before the next sunrise.
But a longitudinal study — in which you ask the same questions or observe the same group for a long period of time, even decades — removes volatility. And if the questions have a range of possible answers, as opposed to “yes” or “no,” you get a more nuanced picture of how people are feeling.
My favorite example of this is a poll that the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication has conducted at least once a year for nearly 20 years. Instead of asking people if they believe that climate change is real and primarily caused by humans, it asks them to put themselves into one of six categories: Alarmed, Concerned, Cautious, Disengaged, Doubtful or Dismissive.
Sometimes, for fun, I ask friends to guess what percentage of Americans think climate change is a hoax. The answers range from 30 percent to 80 percent. In fact, according to Yale’s surveys, it’s about 10 percent; the Dismissive group fluctuates between 9 percent and 12 percent. Doubtful has also remained steady at 12 percent.
If you think climate change isn’t real, or even if you’re not sure, nothing in the past 20 years — the avalanche of studies, the hotter summers, the heavier storms, the droughts, the wildfires, the floods, the lack of snow, species on the verge of extinction — has made you change your mind. That is why I don’t write too many columns trying to “convince” people that climate change is real.
What has changed is that the Cautious (18 percent) and Concerned (28 percent) groups have shrunk while the Alarmed group has grown (26 percent).
The problem is that nearly everyone in the Dismissive group seems to have a podcast, a gig on cable news, a paycheck from a fossil fuel company or a desk in the White House. For the sake of comparison, a 2021 poll by the University of New Hampshire found that 12 percent of Americans believe the moon landings were faked, and last I checked we weren’t reorienting the economy and manufacturing sector around that (knock on wood).
The contrast gets even starker when you zoom out. A 2024 poll from Oxford University found that 89 percent of people around the world want their governments to do more to mitigate climate change. Do you know how hard it is to get 89 percent of people to agree on anything? We can’t even get that many people to agree that the moon landings happened.
If you’ll forgive me for writing about the Pope for two columns in a row, I was struck this week by how often people who work in climate said, in the wake of Pope Francis’ death on April 21, that it was his 2015 encyclical letter Laudato Si’: On Care for our Common Home that gave them the courage to get involved in climate in the first place. They had thought that caring about the climate was a fringe belief. But if the head of a faith-based, conservative, 2,000-year-old global institution was taking the science seriously, maybe it was mainstream.
As the Trump administration continues its attempts to roll back environmental regulations, there’s a temptation to throw up your hands. “He won the election, so I guess this is what the country wants.” But the Oxford poll found that two-thirds of Americans think this country should do more about climate.
If the country is going to make any progress on climate over the next few years — or at least stop the backsliding — the silent majority in the Highlands and around the country and world needs to make itself heard.
This column is part of The 89 Percent Project, an initiative of the nonprofit Covering Climate Now (coveringclimatenow.org).
