Kristin Eberhard, Legal Director, Western Energy and Climate Projects, Santa Monica

Another national poll confirms that Americans increasingly believe there is solid evidence of global warming and that human activities are mostly to blame for climate change.

In the second such survey released this month, the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press reported that 67 percent of U.S. residents now believe the earth’s average temperature has been getting warmer over the past few decades, which is four points from last year and 10 more than in 2009.

As I noted last week, a survey by the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication found a whopping 70 percent of Americans believe global warming is real, a substantial surge over the past two and a half years of polling.

Both surveys also reflected a growing consensus that humans are causing climate change:

• The Yale-George Mason analysis said that for the first time since 2008, more than half of Americans (54%) blame human activities while those who fault natural changes in the environment declined to 30 percent – the lowest level since the survey began.
• The Pew survey found ...

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