Audio By Carbonatix
Good news: The vast majority of Texans think global warming is real. Seventy percent, according to a just-released study from the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication. That’s way more than one might expect from listening to the people they choose for statewide office and proof that Texas’ massive, multi-year drought has been persuasive to all but the most stubborn climate-change deniers.
Now for the not-so-good news: Fewer than half of Texans, 44 percent, believe that climate change is caused “mostly” by people. A plurality of them, 47 percent, think there is “a lot of disagreement among scientists about whether or not global warming is happening.”
See also: The Drought That’s Ravaging Texas Has Produced Some Incredible Photos
Texas doesn’t deviate much from the national norm. The state actually has a higher percentage of global-warming believers than the country as a whole, which came in at 63 percent when Yale last checked in April. And if you throw out California’s 58 percent, Texas is only a few percentage points below other states when it comes to belief in humans as the root cause of climate change.
The takeaway then is not that Texas is some kooky, anti-science outlier when it comes to climate change; it’s that a sizable portion of America is a kooky, anti-science outlier when it comes to climate change.
Perhaps that’s changing. Yale’s statistics show that solid majorities of Texans favor strong actions to curb global warming by businesses, individuals, and government. Some day, maybe they’ll elect representatives who feel the same way.
