Last month, the Trump administration provided the United Nations with formal notice of America's withdrawal from the Paris Agreement on climate change. That treaty, adopted less than five years ago, represents perhaps the global community's most ambitious attempt yet to meaningfully reduce the rate of greenhouse gas emissions and prevent large swaths of this fragile planet from transforming into a series of post-apocalyptic desertscapes. At the conclusion of a mandatory one-year withdrawal period, the United States will officially no longer be a part of that effort.

Whether you think moves like this one are prudent at this juncture in human history depends a lot on your political leanings, according to survey data from the Pew Research Center published in November. On the whole, a majority of Americans—67 percent—believe the federal government is doing too little to address the disastrous projected impact of climate change. But a breakdown of this figure by partisan identity reveals a startling divide: 90 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents agree the government needs to be more active, but only 39 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents say the same. And among conservative Republicans—a group that, Pew notes, constitutes around two-thirds of Republicans—the proportion of climate-concerned citizens is even smaller: only 24 percent.

Voters also disagree sharply about the causes of climate change. Democrats are far likelier to believe human activity contributes "a great deal" to this phenomenon: 84 percent of liberal Democrats and 64 percent of self-described moderate or conservative Democrats, compared to just 14 percent of conservative Republicans, according to Pew's November survey results. By contrast, almost half of conservative Republicans—45 percent—think human activity has little to no effect on the planet's rapidly evolving climate. An additional 39 percent acknowledge that human activity has only "some" impact.

This skepticism, of course, is fundamentally at odds with the scientific consensus on the rapidly accelerating pace and intensity of climate change: that human activity is causing it, and that precious little time remains for us to do much about it. Studies have shown that some 97 percent of climate scientists agree that humans are culpable for recent trends in global warming, and that the number of scientists who reject this worldview is "vanishingly small." In late 2018, the UN released a report predicting that global warming would yield a new reality of widespread droughts, famines, flooding, and wildfires as soon as 2040 if current emissions levels persist. Yet Republican voters, according to the Pew survey's results, are apparently not too concerned about the prospect of living in this world in the not-so-distant future.

This lack of urgency can be attributed in part to the alarming fact that across the board, Republicans do not believe scientists are right and do not put much stock in their alleged expertise. A separate Pew survey from 2016 found that only 11 percent of conservative Republicans think scientists understand the causes of climate change "very well," and 15 percent trust scientists "a lot" to deliver accurate information about the root causes of climate change.

These figures are especially troubling because on the whole, Americans do trust the scientific community: 86 percent, according to an August 2019 Pew survey, are at least fairly sure that scientists act in the public's best interest. But Democrats are more likely than Republicans to be confident in scientists' conclusions, particularly when it comes to the environment. In the midst of what experts warn is an unprecedented and existential threat to life as we know it, the political party that holds the White House and the Senate is controlled by a faction that just isn't buying it.