Photo by Dawid Zawiła on Unsplash.
"The share of Americans who say climate change is mostly the result of human activity has largely not changed in the last decade," even though "[a]lmost all climate scientists say the planet is warming, and that this is caused mostly by human activity," according to the Pew Research Center (May 28, 2026), describing the results of its latest survey.
Asked, "Which of these three statements about the Earth’s temperature comes closest to your view?" 48 percent of respondents preferred "The Earth is getting warmer mostly because of human activity such as burning fossil fuels," 22 percent preferred "The Earth is getting warmer mostly because of natural patterns in the Earth's environment, and 12 percent preferred "There is no solid evidence that the Earth is getting warmer," with 17 percent not sure.
The Pew Research Center observed, "In the new survey, three-quarters of Democrats and Democratic leaners say climate change is the result of human activity. About two-in-ten Republicans and Republican leaners (21%) say the same, a difference of 54 percentage points. This gap has been very wide — at least 46 points — in every survey we've conducted since 2016." Younger Republicans were more likely than older ones to agree.
The survey was conducted (mostly online but partly by live telephone interviewing) from March 16 to March 22, 2026, among 3524 panelists sampled from a nationally representative panel of randomly selected US adults. The margin of sampling error for the full sample was +/- 1.8 percentage points.
