Independent voters want warming action taken, polls show

From a good, broad-based story in Bloomberg:

Among likely voters, 78 percent of Democrats and 56 percent of independents believe humans are warming the earth, according to a Bloomberg National Poll. That finding is consistent with other polls that show undecided voters, and majorities in contested states such as Ohio and Virginia are in line with President Barack Obama and most Democratic candidates in wanting to address the issue.

“Taking a pro-climate stance is a political winner, especially for Democrats,” Edward Maibach, director for the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University, said in an interview. “It’s not the most important issue” for most undecided voters, but “it’s somewhere in their lexicon of issues.”

Carbon-dioxide emissions since the industrial revolution have led to a warming of the earth’s temperature over the past 50 years, threatening to cause extreme weather, drought and coastal flooding, according to the U.S. Global Change Research Program.

A drought affected two-thirds of the lower 48 U.S. states this month, one of the worst such dry spells on record, and temperatures there for the first eight months of the year were the warmest since records were first kept in 1895, according to government data.

No graphs, sadly. 

(Speaking of heat waves, off to Santa Cruz Island to escape for a couple of days.)