A growing number of global warming sceptics and other Americans say global warming is a real threat

A growing majority of Americans think global warming is occurring, that it will become a serious problem and that the U.S. government should do something about it, a new Associated Press-GfK poll finds.

Even most people who say they don't trust scientists on the environment say temperatures are rising.

The poll found 4 out of every 5 Americans said climate change will be a serious problem for the United States if nothing is done about it.

That's up from 73 per cent when the same question was asked in 2009.

In general, U.S. belief in global warming, according to AP-GfK and other polls, has fluctuated over the years but has stayed between about 70 and 85 per cent.

The biggest change in the polling is among people who trust scientists only a little or not at all. About 1 in 3 of the people surveyed fell into that category.

Within that highly sceptical group, 61 per cent now say temperatures have been rising over the past 100 years.

That's a substantial increase from 2009, when the AP-GfK poll found that only 47 per cent of those with little or no trust in scientists believed the world was getting warmer.

This is an important development because, often in the past, opinion about climate change doesn't move much in core groups — like those who deny it exists and those who firmly believe it's an alarming problem, said Jon Krosnick, a Stanford University social psychologist and pollster.

Krosnick, who consulted with The Associated Press on the poll questions, said the changes the poll shows aren't in the hard-core ‘anti-warming’ deniers, but in the next group, who had serious doubts.

‘They don't believe what the scientists say, they believe what the thermometers say,’ Krosnick said. ‘Events are helping these people see what scientists thought they had been seeing all along.’

Phil Adams, a retired freelance photographer from Washington, North Carolina, said he was ‘fairly cynical’ about scientists and their theories.
But he believes very much in climate change because of what he's seen with his own eyes.