Today 39 percent of Americans believe that global warming is harming our health “a great deal” or “a moderate amount,” up from 31 percent in 2014.
In addition, 37 percent of Americans can identify at least one specific climate-related danger— including respiratory problems, extreme heat, pollution and extreme weather events.
And a growing share of Americans believe that harms like heat stroke, asthma and lung disease, bodily harm from extreme weather and hunger will be more common in their community over the next 10 years if nothing is done to address global warming.
These findings are from a survey conducted by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and George Mason University’s (GMU) Center for Climate Change Communication. Surveyors quizzed more than 1,000 adults in December and released their findings February 28. Keerti Gopal wrote about the survey for Inside Climate News.
Respondents increasingly trust physicians, climate scientists, federal agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), local public health departments and the World Health Organization (WHO) to provide information about the health harms of global warming.
Unfortunately, President Donald Trump, who has called climate change “a hoax,” has proposed deep cuts in EPA’s and CDC’s budgets, removed climate and health information from government websites, and withdrawn the U.S. from WHO.
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has reportedly recommended that the agency reverse its 2009 finding that greenhouse gas emissions endanger human health and welfare. That would eliminate the legal basis for the government’s climate laws, such as limits on pollution from automobiles and power plants.
The public’s growing awareness of the link between climate change and people’s health could bolster efforts to combat global warming, according to Edward Maibach, director of GMU’s Center for Climate Change Communication and one of the survey’s principal investigators.
Globally, the World Health Organization has estimated that climate change will cause an extra 250,000 annual deaths from 2030 to 2050 from heat stress, malnutrition, malaria and diarrhea alone.
Inside Climate News reported that the survey reflected increased understanding of well-researched threats to human health: 65 percent of Americans believe that coal harms people’s health, and 38 percent believe natural gas does, a nine-point increase since 2018.
But the survey also found that 15 percent of Americans believe wind energy harms health and 12 percent believe the same about solar power, both increases since 2014. Claims that wind energy or solar power are harmful to human health are unproven and many have been debunked, Gopal wrote, but they’re still being made by some government officials, fossil fuel industry groups and media outlets.
Who should help protect the public from the health threats posed by climate change? According to the Yale-GMU survey, 39% of Americans think federal agencies such as CDC, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) should do more on this front. Twenty-four percent think doctors, nurses, and other health professionals should do more.