Story by Sammy Roth and photographs by Marilyn Chung, The Desert Sun | April 19, 2016

If you've heard the presidential candidates talk about climate change, you'd probably guess it's one of America's most divisive issues. Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders have described global warming as one of the greatest threats facing the United States, while Donald Trump has said he's "not a big believer." Ted Cruz has described climate change as a "pseudoscientific theory" designed by liberals to give government more power.

But polls show that a vast majority of Americans believe climate change is happening — and young people especially want the United States to do something about it.

Millennials are only slightly more likely than their parents and grandparents to accept the scientific consensus that human beings are causing global warming, polls show. But they're far more likely to support actions that would reduce planet-warming emissions. A USA TODAY/Rock the Vote poll earlier this year found that 80 percent of Americans under 35 think the country should transition to "mostly clean or renewable energy" by 2030.

One reason for the strong support: Young people know they're more likely than older generations to be harmed by climate change. Naomi Carrion, a high school senior in Coachella and journalist at Coachella Unincorporated, cited California's severe drought as an example of what global warming has in store for the world.

"It's already causing a big problem for us. It's kind of limiting our resources with water," Carrion said. "What's going to happen next? Where are we going to get our water?"

Tyler La Salle, a first-year student at College of the Desert in Palm Desert, said individuals need to take responsibility by limiting their contributions to global warming. He called for people to change their transportation habits, either by walking more, using public transit or driving electric cars. He also brought up the age-old adage of "reduce, reuse, recycle." Those steps not only eliminate waste, but also reduce energy and water use.

"I think that waiting to do something that needed our action a long time ago is probably not the way to go about things. It's going to take a cultural shift to make a difference, and I think that starts on the individual level," said La Salle, the public affairs director at KCOD CoachellaFM. "I don't want to be part of the generation that’s responsible for killing the planet, and making it unlivable for future cultures and societies."

LISTEN: KCOD CoachellaFM's 'Earth NOW' podcasts on climate change, energy and water

Millennials show the strongest support for climate action, but people of all ages increasingly understand that human beings are causing the planet to heat up.

Take the University of Texas at Austin's energy poll, which found in February that 73 percent of Americans — including 54 percent of Republicans — think the climate is changing. In March, Gallup reported that 65 of percent of Americans believe global warming is caused primarily by human activities, and that 59 percent believe the effects of climate change have already begun.

"The public is there. Every single poll that I have seen says that the public believes that the climate is changing, and that humans do have a role to play," said former New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, a Republican who ran the Environmental Protection Agency under President George W. Bush.

Not everyone who believes in climate change agrees with the overwhelming scientific consensus that human activity is largely to blame. But most people still support actions to fight global warming. As world leaders prepared to negotiate a climate pact in Paris last year, 66 percent of respondents to a New York Times/CBS News poll said the United States should join such a treaty. Sixty-three percent said they would support limits on climate pollution from power plants.

Even Republicans favor climate action — depending on how pollsters ask the question. In a poll commissioned by conservative businessperson Jay Faison last year, 72 percent of Republicans said they support accelerating the development of clean energy. Respondents were most likely to support clean energy when pollsters emphasized that it would improve public health and reduce America's dependence on foreign oil, rather than focusing on its role in fighting global warming.

"If you just ask straightforward questions about energy conservation, mandatory emissions reductions, increased fuel efficiency standards, and don't have the phrase 'climate change' in there…what you see are really high percentages of people on the left and the right supporting those" actions, said Aaron McCright, a sociologist at Michigan State University.

INTERACTIVE: Where the presidential candidates stand on climate

But the public's views aren't reflected in Congress.

The Center for American Progress Action Fund, a liberal advocacy group, said last month that 182 members of the House and Senate — all of them Republicans — have denied or questioned climate science. The country's foremost climate denier might be Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe, who wrote the book, "The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future."

It's not hard to explain the gap between what Americans believe and who they're electing. While voters largely understand that climate change is happening, most of them don't care that much.

The Pew Research Center found earlier this year that 38 percent of Americans — and just 14 percent of Republicans — rank climate as a "top priority." Pew also found in a 2013 poll surveying 39 countries that Americans were less concerned about climate change than residents of 32 of those countries.

Climate just isn't a make-or-break issue for many voters, said Jon Krosnick, a Stanford University professor who has studied public opinion on climate change since the mid-1990s.

"When people walk into the voting booth in November, only about 10 percent of people are going to be voting on this issue," he said.

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The flip side is that there aren't many die-hard climate deniers, either. McCright, from Michigan State, said about 10 percent of the public consistently denies that the world is getting warmer.

Political observers have different ideas about why climate change denial is so rampant among congressional Republicans, but some point to campaign donations from the fossil fuel industry. The 182 members of Congress listed as climate deniers by the Center for American Progress Action Fund have collectively received $74.4 million from the coal, oil and gas sectors since 1990, according to a Desert Sun analysis of campaign finance data from the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. The other 352 members of Congress have received just $41.8 million from those industries.

"Every Republican (presidential candidate) is in overt climate denial right now, but I guarantee that they're not as dumb or anti-science as they look. They're absolutely chasing campaign funds," said Jeffrey Sachs, director of Columbia University's Earth Institute and an adviser to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. "Unfortunately this is a game right now, but it's a game with our planet's life on the line."

LOSING SNOW: What global warming means for water supplies

Other experts point to the rise of political polarization across a wide range of issues. Members of both parties are increasingly rewarded for catering to base voters who reliably turn out for primaries, and punished for falling out of step with party leadership.

In the 1960s and 1970s, environmental protection was relatively noncontroversial, with Congress passing laws like the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act by huge margins. President Richard Nixon, a Republican, first proposed the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency, which Trump has said he would eliminate if elected.

By the early 1990s, partisan rancor had started dividing Democrats and Republicans on the environment. McCright pointed to the rise of international concerns like climate change, and to proposed solutions that often involved government intervention and global cooperation. Those proposals, he said, played into simmering right-wing fears of socialism and global governance. Conservative publications like National Review and Human Events started arguing that environmental regulations would kill jobs, and Republican politicians quickly followed suit.

Ideas abound as to why some voters reject climate science, too.

One theory: Some people don't believe in climate change because they're ideologically opposed to the solutions that have been proposed. Conservatives who don't like government regulations, some researchers say, are more likely to reject climate science if they believe stopping climate change will require government interference in the economy.

READ MORE: Why fighting climate change won't destroy the economy

University of Oregon professor Troy Campbell said he validated that theory — known as "solution aversion" — in a 2014 study. Campbell found that Republicans were more likely to believe predictions about future temperature increases after being asked to evaluate policy solutions that emphasized the free market, rather than proposals that emphasized taxes or regulations.

When liberals frame climate change as a problem that government must solve, Campbell said, they make it harder for conservatives to accept the science, because doing so would require them to admit "that the largest problem in modern times needs to be solved in a liberal way." Instead, Campbell said, climate advocates should emphasize that global warming threatens the American Dream, and that free-market solutions like cap-and-trade or clean energy development can help.

"How do you (convince) the people who are least likely to support climate change science, without changing the solution? You say it is consistent with protecting something they care about, like the American system," Campbell said. "Make it about protecting America."

READ MORE: Climate change far more than an environmental issue

Other experts believe that if scientists and the media did a better job of communicating straightforward, unbiased information, some climate skeptics might be swayed.

Max Boykoff, a professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, has studied media coverage of climate change for two decades. News organizations, he noted, continue to give outsize coverage to climate deniers like "Greatest Hoax" author Inhofe, who famously threw a snowball on the floor of the Senate last year in a scientifically meaningless attempt to disprove global warming.

"When you subject a complicated, complex, multifaceted issue to the pressures, the norms, the practices of everyday journalism, you end up with some surface-level stories," Boykoff said.

Boykoff has tracked climate change coverage in major newspapers, finding that the volume of coverage ebbs and flows with events like last year's Paris climate summit. But overall, the issue isn't getting a lot of attention. Media Matters for America recently found that the four major TV news networks — CBS, NBC, ABC and Fox — spent just 146 minutes covering climate change during the entirety of last year. ABC devoted just 13 minutes to the topic.

Climate advocates are optimistic, though, in part because the public seems increasingly concerned about climate change. In Gallup's most recent poll, 64 percent of respondents said they worry a "great deal" or a "fair amount" about global warming, higher than in any year since 2008. Forty-one percent of respondents said they expect global warming to pose a "serious threat" to them or their way of life within their lifetimes.

EXTINCTION CRISIS: How climate change is intensifying threats to nature

Sachs believes public demand for climate action will eventually outweigh campaign money from the fossil fuel industry, forcing politicians to take dramatic action. He’s just not sure the balance will shift fast enough for the world to avert the worst impacts of climate change.

"I have no doubt that as the climate continues to become more unstable, as people begin to experience more shocks and disruptions all over the world, there will be a turn" toward climate-friendly energy sources, Sachs said. "So far, the lobbies have won. But the public, by an increasing margin, knows that this is not safe."

Digital visual producer Marilyn Chung contributed to this report.

Sammy Roth writes about energy and the environment for The Desert Sun. He can be reached at sammy.roth@desertsun.com, (760) 778-4622 and @Sammy_Roth.