The Pew Research Center has released its latest poll on public attitudes towards climate change, and the results are both troubling and confounding.

Over the last year and a half, the number of Americans who believe the Earth is warming has dropped. The decline is especially precipitous among Republicans: in January 2007, 62 percent accepted global warming, compared to just 49 percent now.

Seeing as how 2007 was the second-warmest year on record, and the popular press finally took climate change seriously, I'm not sure how attitudes shifted in this manner. That's the troubling part.



The confounding part: among college-educated poll respondents, 19 percent of Republicans believe that human activities are causing global warming, compared to 75 percent of Democrats. But take that college education away and Republican believers rise to 31 percent while Democrats drop to 52 percent.

That strikes me as deeply weird. I don't even have a snarky quip, much less an explanation. What do you think, Wired Science readers? Why are less-educated Republicans more likely to agree with the global scientific community than their more-educated political counterparts, and vice versa among Democrats?

A Deeper Partisan Divide Over Global Warming [Pew Research Center]

Images: Grant Neufeld; Pew Research Center

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