In its fourth annual survey of Australians’ attitude to climate change the CSIRO has found it worries us a lot, but we are more concerned about other aspects of the environment.
Launching the study the CSIRO revealed that 5219Australians were surveyed on a range of environmental issues and while there’s been little change in the community’s view on the reality of climate change, with 81 per cent saying it’s real, the issue doesn’t rate highly in importance.
In fact according to the CSIRO climate change comes 14th out of 16 general concerns, and seventh out of eight environmental concerns.
“Similar to previous years, we found the majority of respondents think the Earth’s climate is changing, and people are more likely to think that human activity is the cause (47 per cent) as opposed to natural variations in temperature (39 per cent),” according to Dr Zoe Leviston, a social psychologist at CSIRO and lead author of the survey.
“When we look at repeat respondents (those people who participated in more than one of our surveys), we find no significant changes since 2010, although there was a very slight increase in the small proportion of people who say they “don’t know”,” Dr Leviston said.
Unsurprisingly, the survey found that those opposed to the belief have a skewed view of what they think others think.
Less than eight per cent of respondents thought climate change was not happening at all, but thought almost 50 per cent of the Australian public shared their view.
Dr Leviston said the low ranking might reflect people turning off the issue because it had become so politicised, artificially pulling the ranking down.
Some 56.5 per cent of those surveyed thought temperatures had increased since 1990, with more than 60 per cent saying they expected temperatures to rise over the coming 20 years.
About a quarter thought temperatures had been stable and would remain so, the survey found.
On the other hand, people tended to assume they were doing more to improve the environment than others, a so-called “self-enhancement bias”, even when they were not.
“We do find this tendency to inflate how good we are,” Dr Leviston said.
The survey, carried out each year in July and August, has shown the importance placed on climate change to be relatively stable.
Among sources of information, trust has trended higher for most groups, with university scientists the most trusted.
Trust in governments, car companies and oil companies were the lowest among 13 groups tracked, but these too had risen over the surveys.
