My data shows the public is largely uninformed about climate change. The first of two links I have posted on my data page is the comparison between google searches for climate change and google searches for global warming.These searches all took place over the past 5 years. The term global warming is searched much more often than climate change. However, climate scientists have begun to use the term climate change rather than global warming, as global warming suggests an overall warming. Though average atmospheric temperatures have risen, some regions are not necessarily made warmer. Climate change refers to any changes in climate that are related to an excess of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, which more accurately describes the issue than global warming does. This means the public has trouble keeping up with new discoveries and terminologies related to climate change.
The public also isn’t connecting these extreme weather events to climate change, as shown by the two graphs comparing climate change searches to wildfire and hurricane searches. When a string of natural disasters occurs that is noticeably different than weather that is typical to an area, you'd expect people to realize that and tie these events to climate change. If this happened, the graphs would look similar, with climate change searches spiking around the same time that searches for these natural disasters spike. However, both graphs indicate that searches for climate change are unrelated to searches for wildfires and hurricanes. Even though these events are obviously correlated, as indicated by my two articles, people don’t seem to be making that connection.
Overall, people in the US seem to be less knowledgeable about climate change than I expected. My evidence shows that people generally use the incorrect term “global warming” rather than than the more accurate term “climate change”. It also shows that people don’t realize that climate change is connected to the recent prevalence of natural disasters. However, we cannot be 100% positive that my results and interpretations of data are correct, as it is based only off of 3 graphs, 3 articles, and my own background knowledge of the subject. .