The Declining Public Interest of Climate Change

- Carson Gragg -

My goal with this project was to discover how the public interest of climate change and global warming have changed over the past decade or so. I used Google Trends to identify how often both climate change and global warming have been searched since 2004. As soon as I searched for "global warming" on google trends I saw that there was a clear decrease over the past 11 years.

This data shows that, from 1911 to 2016, global land and sea temperatures have steadily risen 1.36°C(NOAA). This change demonstrates the threat of climate change, the fact that it is constantly becoming a larger threat, and how everyone should become increasingly concerned about climate change.

On November 4 2016, countries agreed to set a goal of preventing global temperatures to increase past 2°C and if possible 1.5°C. This is known as the Paris Agreement.

Climate Change is cleary a problem for the world. According to an author of a key UN report that will outline the dangers of breaching the 1.5 C limit, "The world’s governments are nowhere near on track to meet their commitment to avoid global warming of more than 1.5C above the pre-industrial period"(Milman). Also "If the world doesn’t act now, it won’t be able to stay under the 1.5C target unless it turns to some risky or expensive measures"(Chang).

Works Cited

• NOAA National Centers for Environmental information, Climate at a Glance: Global Time Series, published September 2018, retrieved on September 28, 2018 from https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cag/
• Milman, Oliver. “World 'Nowhere near on Track' to Avoid Warming beyond 1.5C Target.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 27 Sept. 2018, www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/sep/26/global-warming-climate-change-targets-un-report.