Editor’s Note: CNN recently reported that Americans rank climate change at the bottom of their list of public policy concerns, despite constant media haranguing about it every time severe weather strikes. The public’s lack of concern now is the same as it ever was. As discussed at Climate Change Weekly repeatedly over the years most of the public never considered the potential threat of climate change as one of their top issues of concern. In opinion surveys, the general public, registered voters, and likely voters have consistently ranked climate change at or near the bottom of issues of concern, being unwilling to pay almost anything to prevent or minimize it.
Guest Post by Leslie Eastman. Originally posted at Legal Insurrection.
Voters understand that their quality of life is more directly tied to jobs and immigration, rather than trace amounts of a life-essential gas floating in the atmosphere.
After multiple summers of “heat dome” hysteria, with climate cultism foisted on the public with apocalyptic headlines and ritual invocations of a planet supposedly on the brink, one of the leading pseudoscience propagandists has discovered an inconvenient political reality.
It turns out voters remain highly focused on matters closer to home.
CNN’s chief data analyst, Harry Enten, appeared with anchor John Berman this week to examine the political implications of “global warming” following the fake news reports that July was the hottest month ever recorded in this country.
Despite decades of relentless messaging and narrative-pushing, Enten reports that just 3% of voters list climate change as a top midterm concern, far behind the economy and immigration.
Despite all the talk of climate change, voters, simply put, don’t care.
Climate ranks 14th on list of top issue for the midterm vote (at 3%).
Those who say it’s a very big problem is the same as in 2016 (~40%).
Not even a majority agree humans cause any climate change. pic.twitter.com/IQYG9xPYmc
— (((Harry Enten))) (@ForecasterEnten) August 12, 2026
I would like to think that the hard work of many good scientists, who have worked hard to provide context into the complexities of climate science and who stress that carbon dioxide is not “toxic” to the environment, has played a large part in the rational assessment of policy priorities of most Americans.
To put it in perspective, our planet is in an interglacial period that represents a relatively warm interval between glacial phases of an ice age, when global temperatures rise over thousands of years. Ice sheets and glaciers retreat, adding water to the oceans and raising sea level. Vegetation zones and ecosystems also shift as conditions warm, cyclically and naturally. Earth is currently in the Holocene interglacial, which began roughly 11,700 years ago.
Researchers now identify 11 interglacial periods in the last 800,000 years, including today’s Holocene. Most of these eras lasted about 10,000–30,000 years. The last four each exceeded roughly 20,000 years, although their most stable warm intervals lasted approximately 10,000–15,000 years.
We should probably be grateful to be as warm as we are, as the alternative is substantially less pleasant.
I am grateful to Legal Insurrection for giving me the chance to do my part in getting a solidly science-based perspective published, which I glean from real experts who are often silenced by our mainstream media, ignored by eco-activist bureaucrats, and punished by climate cult extremists in academia. I would like to think these efforts have made a difference.
Americans are tired of being told that every warm spell proves imminent catastrophe, especially as many of us remember being warned with equal certainty about 50 years ago that the next great threat would be a future ice age.
The public recognizes that weather is hot in summer without accepting that every elevated thermometer reading requires another costly round of climate-policy panic. Voters also understand that their quality of life is more directly tied to jobs and immigration than to trace amounts of a life-essential gas floating in the atmosphere.
In any event, the gap between elite climate messaging and voter priorities is becoming impossible for even CNN to ignore… as much as it may like to.
