00:54 Four Out of Five Americans Say Climate Change is Real More and more people are beginning to believe climate change is a real problem. Matt Sampson has the details on what Americans think the solutions should be.

More than 80 percent of Americans now believe that climate change is occurring, according to a new survey conducted by global reinsurance giant Munich Re America.

Out of the 1,000-plus Americans asked whether or not they "believe that climate change is occurring" 83 percent of the respondents said yes, 15 percent said no and 2 percent had no response.

The question didn't address the cause of climate change, and instead focused on whether or not respondents believed in climate change in general. Peter Hoeppe, the head of Munich Re's Geo Risks Research team told USA Today that 60 percent of survey respondents believed Earth's climate was changing due to environmental impacts from humans.

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Munich Re America president Tony Kuczinski said that the results show a shift in American attitudes toward climate change.

"Our survey findings indicate that national sentiment over whether or not climatic changes are occurring has finally reached a tipping point," Kuczinski told USA Today.

ORC International , an independent market research company, conducted the survey for the reinsurance firm, which has provided risk analysis to its clients on the potential impacts from climate change for decades.

The company's main business is insuring other insurance companies, which means it stands to face huge losses from catastrophic weather disasters in the years ahead if nothing is done to combat climate change.

In 2005, Munich Re helped create the Munich Climate Insurance Initiative, which seeks to "develop insurance-related solutions to help manage the impacts of climate change," especially for small island nations in the Caribbean.

Today, the company issues periodic reports and surveys on attitudes toward climate change, which offer a window into how different societies' perception of the risks from climate change have shifted over the years.

Other threats still considered worse

In the Dec. 4 survey, respondents were less passionate about climate change when it was pitted against other threats like economic and political instability. Only 14 percent of Americans cared more about climate change than political instability (31 percent), economic crisis (27 percent) and pandemic (22 percent), Yahoo notes.

The survey also took into account climate change impacts, like the potential increase in frequency and severity of severe weather events. Sixty-three percent of Americans were concerned about weather impacts from climate change with a stronger division along geographic lines.

Northeasterners were the most concerned about an increase in severe weather events (71 percent), followed by Westerners (65 percent), Midwesterners (60 percent) and Southerners (59 percent).

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That regional division was less pronounced when it came to a general belief in climate change. Even though only 59 percent of Southerners were concerned with a potential change in severe weather events, 84 percent of them still believed that climate change was occurring.

The results follow a September survey by Pew that also showed a majority of Americans believe climate change is happening. In that survey, 61 percent of all Americans believed that there was evidence of climate change, but that the threat of climate change was less important than other global threats.

Even if more Americans believe in climate change, they still don't rate its threats as highly as other countries do. In another Pew survey conducted in 2013, only 40 percent of Americans perceived climate change as a major threat, 14 percentage points lower than the average across the 39 countries surveyed.

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