Climate Change And Virginia

The results of an important new survey were released by the Miller Center last night, and on UVA Today we have a story about the findings:

Three out of four Virginians believe there is “solid evidence” of global warming over the past 40 years, according to the first survey of Virginians’ attitudes toward climate change, presented Tuesday at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center for Public Affairs.

The telephone survey of 660 Virginia residents, conducted in September, found that attitudes in Virginia toward the big questions of climate change — Is it happening? Is it caused by human activity? — are similar to national attitudes, according to previous surveys from the Pew Research Center and elsewhere.

But this survey broke new ground in asking more detailed questions about why people believe or disbelieve that global warming is happening, according to the survey’s authors: Barry Rabe, Miller Center visiting scholar from the University of Michigan, and Christopher Borick, director of the Institute of Public Opinion at Muhlenberg College.

The survey asked Virginians to identify the primary factor underlying their beliefs about climate change. Among the 75 percent of Virginians who do believe the earth is warming, one in four cited personal experience as the top reason. The next most popular reasons were melting glaciers and polar ice (21 percent), media coverage (14 percent) and changing weather patterns or strong storms (13 percent) — another type of personal experience of the weather.

Among the 13 percent of Virginians who do not believe the Earth is warming, the top reason given was also personal experience of the weather, suggesting that weather is in the eye of the beholder.


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