Climate Poll

by Sam Moore

The recent poll by the Princeton Student Climate Initiative was a success, with 112 students responding. The poll asked students to answer a number of questions regarding their attitude to climate-related topics on a scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree). The results shed light on some interesting views of the student body.

First of all, 91.9% of participants believe that climate change is mainly caused by human activity, selecting 4 (25.2%), or 5 (66.7%), while 6.3% strongly disagree with this idea. Furthermore, 95.6% believe climate change poses a threat to the world within our lifetime (4 and 5), and 68.4% believe climate change will affect them personally.

The polling shows that 90.6% of responders are interested in learning about climate change. When asked which topics they wished to learn about, we found that there is particular interest in solutions relating to the topics of energy (78.8%), food (66.3%), land use (55.8%), and buildings and cities (52.9%). There is also majority interest in learning about other issues that could be affected by climate change, ranging from biodiversity, to national security.

When it comes to reporting climate change, the biggest problem according to students is that it is ‘not actionable’ (58.3%), while 44.4% also believe that there is not enough reporting on climate change.