How Americans Came To Their Senses About Climate Change

For a long time climate change felt far off to many Americans. Though people saw the pictures of melting ice caps and heard the warnings from Al Gore and 97 percent of climate scientists, they never truly felt this long-term environmental trend would threaten their own lives. Maybe it would affect future generations or people in the global south, where climate change will have especially deleterious effects, but not their own communities, not them. So not only did countless Americans treat global warming like some minor threat that wouldn't hurt them in any major way, but many simply denied that it was even happening.