Climate change and the public: The end of a love story?

EUobserver / [Comment] Climate change and the public: The end of a love story?

Remember last year when the whole world was looking at a small and cold country in Europe - Denmark - mesmerized by an international conference on climate change known as COP15?

This year, many people won't even know where the follow-up conference, COP16, is taking place. While the next round of international climate negotiations in Cancun, Mexico is approaching fast, publics and the media on both sides of the Atlantic remain unfazed. As new polls show, people in fact aren't particularly concerned about climate change any more, don't see it as a top priority, and in some cases even doubt that it is really happening.

As the German Marshall Fund's Transatlantic Trends finds, only six percent of Americans list fighting climate change as a top priority for their country, while 20 percent of Europeans think it should be on the top of the list for their leaders. According to the Pew Global Attitudes survey, 52 percent of Germans consider climate change a serious problem, but only 46 percent of the French, 40 percent of the British, and 37 percent of Americans agree.

When asked if they would be willing to pay higher prices to address global climate change, more than half of German and British respondents were willing to do so, but just little under 40 percent of French and Americans approved. These numbers are probably connected to a rising scepticism about climate change in general. In a February poll conducted by the BBC, only 26 percent of the British believed that climate change was happening and man-made, down from 41 percent only three months earlier.

In the United States, half of the population believes that global warming is due to human activities, down from 61 percent in 2003, according to a Gallup poll conducted in March.