Getting hot: How Americans are feeling about climate change, as September temperatures soared
A new survey from Pew Research Center shines a light on how Americans are increasingly thinking about climate change, with 63% of respondents expecting the negative impacts of climate change to get worse during their lifetimes.
The questions, asked of ~8,800 Americans, also explored how people feel about the individual sacrifices they may have to make. 23% of people polled expect “major sacrifices” in their own lives because of climate change, while 48% expect to have to make “minor sacrifices” and 28% foresee “no sacrifices”.
Getting hot in here
The new survey comes just a few weeks after data confirmed by NASA, NOAA and the EU’s Copernicus Service revealed that September 2023 was the most unusually warm month in more than a century-and-a-half of temperature recordings, with a temperature anomaly of 1.44°C (relative to the 20th century average).
That September reading all but confirmed that 2023 will break records, with NASA researchers predicting (with “99% probability”) that this year will be the warmest on record.
