Limiting climate change requires research on climate action

摘要

To realize ambitious climate targets, research should focus more on effective ways to encourage rapid and wide-scale changes in climate mitigation actions, and less on understanding climate change beliefs.What percentage of Europeans believes that climate change is not happening, and that it is not caused by human action? When I pose this question in my talks, most scientists and practitioners come up with percentages well above 20%, and in many cases even around 50%. Yet the eighth round of the European Social Survey (ESS8)1 conducted in 2016-2017 indicates that, on average, only 2.3% of the respondents in the 23 participating countries (22 in Europe and Israel) believe that the world’s climate is definitely not changing, and only 4.5% believe that the climate is probably not changing (Fig. 1). The largest proportion of true climate deniers was found in the Russian Federation, where 9.7% believe the climate is definitely not changing. Similarly, only 1.9% of ESS respondents who do not deny climate change believe that climate change is entirely caused by natural processes (with again the highest proportion, but still only 5.7%, in theRussian Federation), and only 6.9% believe it is mainly caused by natural processes (Fig. 2).