Predictions for the World in 2008

The Kyoto Pro­to­col: The U.S. ver­sus the World?

Using a vari­ety of pub­lic opin­ion polls over a num­ber of years and from a num­ber of coun­tries this paper revis­its the ques­tions of cross­na­tion­al pub­lic con­cern for glob­al warm­ing first exam­ined over a decade ago. Although the sci­en­tif­ic com­mu­ni­ty today speaks out on glob­al cli­mat­ic change in essen­tial­ly a uni­fied voice con­cern­ing its anthro­pogenic caus­es and poten­tial dev­as­tat­ing impacts at the glob­al lev­el, it remains the case that many cit­i­zens of a num­ber of nations still seem to har­bor con­sid­er­able uncer­tain­ties about the prob­lem itself. Although it could be argued that there has been a slight improve­ment over the last decade in the public’s under­stand­ing regard­ing the anthro­pogenic caus­es of glob­al warm­ing, the peo­ple of all the nations stud­ied remain large­ly uni­formed about the prob­lem. In a recent inter­na­tion­al study on knowl­edge about glob­al warm­ing, the cit­i­zens of Mex­i­co led all fif­teen coun­tries sur­veyed in 2001 with just twen­ty-six per­cent of the sur­vey respon­dents cor­rect­ly iden­ti­fy­ing burn­ing fos­sil fuels as the pri­ma­ry cause of glob­al warm­ing. The cit­i­zens of the U.S., among the most edu­cat­ed in the world, where some­where in the mid­dle of the pack, tied with the cit­i­zens of Brazil at fif­teen per­cent, but slight­ly low­er than Cubans. In response to Pres­i­dent Bush’s with­draw­al of the Kyoto Pro­to­col in 1991, the U.S. pub­lic appears to be far more sup­port­ive of the action than the cit­i­zens of a num­ber of Euro­pean coun­tries where there was con­sid­er­able out­rage about the deci­sion.

Car­los Menen­dez
http://www.segurosmagazine.es