Do you think that global warming is happening? That's one of the questions that researchers from UC Santa Barbara, the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and Utah State University asked people throughout the United States in a recent survey.

And based on their results, they estimate that the residents of the San Francisco metropolitan area have the highest percentage of people who "think that global warming is happening."

The researchers estimate that 82 percent of residents in the SF metro area, which includes Oakland, Berkeley, San Rafael and Hayward, believe that "the world's average temperature has been increasing over the past 150 years, may be increasing more in the future, and that the world's climate may change as a result."

According to the researchers, who are basing their estimates off of data collected since 2008, the Bay Area's percentage of people who think climate change is real is 12 percent higher than the national average.

Alameda County is estimated to have the highest percentage of residents (84 percent) who think global warming is happening out of any county in the country. And California's 13th and 12th Congressional Districts (Barbara Lee's district in the East Bay and Nancy Pelosi's district of San Francisco) are estimated to have the first and second highest percentage of climate change believers at 86 and 85 percent, respectively.

The data collected by the researchers and the estimates they made based on the data were used to create a series of heat maps that depict a citizenry that is still divided on climate change (despite an estimated 70 percent of U.S. residents believing it's real, according to the researchers).

Public opinion – even that of Bay Area residents – is much lower than the scientific consensus on climate change. According to a 2016 review of studies published in peer-reviewed journals, 97 percent of climate scientists agree that human-caused climate change is happening.

At the state level, California falls behind a bit (at 76 percent), with researchers estimating that it has the third highest percentage of residents who believe in climate change. Hawaii has the highest percentage of climate change believers (77 percent), according to the researchers, and New York has the second highest (76 percent).

If you include Washington, D.C., then it comes out on top for the highest percentage of residents who believe climate change is real at 82 percent.

San Francisco County was the county with the second highest percentage of residents who believe climate change is real (83 percent), according to the researchers' estimates. San Jose's metropolitan area, which includes Sunnyvale and Santa Clara, had the sixth highest percentage of residents who believe in global warming (79 percent).