Poll examines county's beliefs in global warming

SANDPOINT — About 58 percent of Bonner County residents believe global warming is occurring, according to the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication.

However, only 43 percent of the residents polled believe global warming is a result of human activities and only 36 percent believe the scientific community is on the right track with regard to climate change.

More than a half million of Idaho’s residents were polled and 58 percent of them believe global warming is happening.

The Yale Project polled Bonner County residents in 2014 to gauge the community’s beliefs about global warming, risk perceptions and support of policies which address climate change. More than 17,000 of the county’s 29,000 residents were polled.

Yale Project officials sought to drill down on climate change perceptions to gain a better understanding of the wide variety of opinions on the subject nationwide.

“Public opinion polling is generally done at the national level, because local level polling is very costly and time intensive. Our team of scientists, however, has developed a geographic and statistical model to downscale national public opinion results to the county, congressional district, and state levels,” project officials said in an overview.

The results of the polling were used to create an interactive map that shows peoples’ attitudes and beliefs about climate change (environment.yale.edu/poe/v2014).

The poll in Bonner County indicates that 45 percent of the respondents are worried about global warming and 38 percent believe it is already harming people in the U.S. Only 30 percent of those polled believe global warming will personally affect them and 53 percent believe it will harm future generations.

With regard to policy support, 75 percent of those polled in Bonner County said they support funding research into renewable energy resources and 68 percent support regulating carbon dioxide as a pollutant, according to the poll.

Support for more stringent limits on coal-fired power plants was gauged at 57 percent. Requiring utilities to produce 20 percent of its electricity from renewable resources was met with support from 55 percent of respondents in Bonner County.