The United States remains the only developed democracy where The Climate Change Debate is primarily over whether climate change is real. Most places, the debate is over what to do about it. But not in the World's Greatest Democracy, where one of the two major political parties our system allows simply denies—using various, ever-shifting, often-contradictory lines of rhetoric—that it's real and man-made and we must do something to combat it. A new chunk of polling data suggests this dynamic may continue, regardless of the mountains of evidence that have led scientists to come to an unambiguous consensus that the climate is changing and human beings are largely causing it.

NBC News published a report Sunday that illustrated the problem and, simultaneously, demonstrated a major factor in why it has been allowed to persist. The top-line takeaway was that the American public now mostly accepts that the problem is real. Oh, joy.

On the most basic level, there is big agreement that climate change is a real thing and is happening before our eyes...data showed 70 percent of Americans believe “global warming is happening” and 57 percent believe “global warming is being caused mostly by human activities.” In a nation as divided as the United States is right now, those are remarkable numbers.

You can see the Both Sides-ism bubbling to the surface. A Nation Divided...between people who accept something we have empirically discovered about the world around us and people who don't. But 70 percent do believe it's real. As a yardstick, Pew Research published the results of a survey last year that found 67 percent of Americans believe God or a higher power has personally rewarded them in their lives. 25 percent say they talk to God and God talks back.

David McNew Getty Images

Still, the good news persists.

Two-thirds of those surveyed say they believe climate change is a serious problem and the nation needs to take action. That number is up 15 percentage points from 1999. At the same time, only 30 percent say we don’t know enough yet or that we don’t need to be concerned. That figure is down 13 points from 1999.

This is genuine progress, a sign that messages from the scientific community about what is happening to our world are starting to break into even the stubborn American consciousness. Maybe it is the extreme weather, in the form of massive wildfires and relentless drought and savagely powerful storms, that's driven it home for people. Scientists are becoming increasingly confident in their ability to link the increasing severity of these events to larger environmental forces tied to climate change. Or maybe it's just that younger generations, who will actually have to deal with the consequences of continued inaction, are making up more of the adult population. But we are moving closer to a genuine debate over what to do, finally moving beyond the counterfactual debate over whether something needs to be done.

Christopher Furlong Getty Images

Still, there's a real takeaway buried within about how things got this bad. While the report found beliefs about whether it's a serious problem that needs action were largely uniform across the groups measured—Hispanics (70 percent yes), African-Americans (64), whites (66), urban-dwellers (69), suburbanites (68), rural Americans (57)—there was one group that seems to be a bit of an outlier.

Among Democrats, 71 percent say climate change is an urgent problem. That is a 42-point increase since 1999. For independent voters, 47 percent say they want action taken on climate change, a figure that is up 22 points since 1999.

But the number is much lower for Republicans; only 15 percent see a pressing need to deal with the issue. More noteworthy than the difference, however, is the stability of the Republican figure. That 15 percent mark is unchanged since the same question was asked in 1999.

It is not exactly a winding maze to get to the conclusion here. Republican voters are far less likely to accept climate change because, first and foremost, their political leaders represent the interests of fossil-fuel companies who pay their campaign bills. As a result, Republican leaders continually dispute the scientific consensus. They are supported by conservative Washington think-tanks that accept millions in donations from those same energy interests and then, in another coincidence, continually pump out studies that muddy the waters around climate change. Sometimes, they straight-up offer scientists $10,000-a-pop to dispute the consensus.

Martin Stocker-Waldhuber, a glaciologist with the Austrian Institute for Interdisciplinary Mountain Research, measures a wooden marker pole protruding on an upper portion of the Outer Mullwitzkees glacier Sean Gallup Getty Images

But more than all that, even, there is the conservative media ecosystem, which truly began to take shape in the mid-1990s with the ascendence of talk radio and the birth, in 1996, of the Fox News Channel. By the Obama era, it was supplemented with various digital content farms to form an almost entirely closed epistemic bubble where belief that climate change was a trumped-up issue peddled by hand-wringing coastal liberal elites who want to tell you how to live your life and drive up the cost of your electric bill became unquestionable canon. That the evidence for this worldview was primarily Rush Limbaugh Saying Things, while the evidence for climate change is peer-reviewed scientific study, never has seemed to matter.

But by now, that's old news. What's perhaps more intriguing here are the numbers for independents. Just under half now think the problem is serious and needs action, admittedly a 22 point jump since 1999. But a little over one-point-per-year progress, amid escalating extreme weather and the sixth mass extinction event in this planet's history, isn't exactly flying. It's fitting, then, that the NBC report was published in conjunction with Meet The Press, the network's venerable Sunday talk show which, in November, greeted the catastrophic findings of the United States' fourth National Climate Assessment by inviting on a representative of the American Enterprise Institute to sow doubt and confusion about whether humans are causing climate change.



This content is imported from Twitter. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

Right-wing panelist on Meet the Press on climate change: "I'm not a scientist ... We need to also recognize we had two of the coldest years, biggest drop in global temperatures that we have had since the 1980s, the biggest in the last 100 years. We don't talk about that." pic.twitter.com/OLPUZOpoKR — John Whitehouse (@existentialfish) November 25, 2018

In fairness, Meet The Press devoted an entire hour to climate change this past Sunday, and Chuck Todd did not host climate deniers this time around. That's a great step forward, but there's a lot of ground to make up. For decades, the mainstream Beltway media has been engaged in an obsessive quest to give Both Sides of every debate equal time and seriousness, regardless of whether there is any evidence to support them. This is not out of a desire to inform viewers of the empirical truth as we know it, but to avoid allegations of bias from the right-wing—allegations that partisans will always lob at outlets that report things they find inconvenient. The same impulse showed up in the poll report, which featured these passages:

If you expect those changing views to lead to action in Washington, however, think again. In the places where it counts, where laws and regulations are made, the feelings concerning what should be done about climate change are much more divided...

...In a nation as divided as the United States is right now, those are remarkable numbers...

...And even with all the movement and the apparent agreement in these numbers, the unchanging nature of that partisan split is arguably the most crucial in terms of national policy. There are more than 300 million people in the United States, but politically speaking there are two major parties and on the issues of whether and how to deal with climate change they have decidedly different views. Public opinion in one thing, but as long as those party differences persist, movement on the issue is likely going to be hard to come by in Washington.

Disagreements on whether reality is real are treated as not just legitimate, but as inevitable features of political life. Sure, Republicans deny the asteroid is headed towards Earth. But in these divisive times... Never is it considered that framing the discussion in this way may actually be a major force in allowing this dynamic to continue. This kind of cynicism masquerading as political realism—something adjacent to what my colleague, Charles P. Pierce, calls the Beltway media's Church of the Savvy—only serves to enable cynical actors to maintain the status quo without real justification.

It is not the only reason. But surely part of the equation in why climate denialism has been allowed to persist in mainstream American politics for this long is that mainstream American news outlets continually grant it unfounded legitimacy in a quest for Both Sides false equivalence to avoid bad-faith criticism. More than 47 percent of American independents should be aware that the science is unequivocal on climate change—that it is a serious problem that requires human action. More than 71 percent of Democrats should, too. That they don't is an indictment of the people and organizations they have long trusted to provide them with the truth about our world—not made-for-TV "debates" that paint the truth and fantastic nonsense as two sides of the same coin.

Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io