On Sunday, over 400,000 citizens filled the streets of New York City, and many more protested in other cities. They were demonstrating their anger at the government's refusal to take appropriate action to curb global climate change (commonly called global warming). It marls the largest crowds to ever demonstrate for action on global warming.
Now a new poll has been released that shows a rising number of Americans believe global warming is mostly caused by human activity (such as the burning of fossil fuels). It is the New York Times / CBS News Poll -- done between September 10th and 14th of a random national sample of 1,000 adults (with a 3 point margin of error). The poll shows that 54% of the general public now believes global warming is caused by human activity -- the largest percentage in this survey since they have been polling on this question.
It looks like we may finally be turning a corner on global warming -- at least as far as the public is concerned. Sadly though, the government is still refusing to act. Note in the chart above that while majorities of Democrats (67%), Independents (53%) and the general public (54%) now believe it is caused by humans and want to take action -- the same is not true of Republicans. They still believe the lies told by their leaders -- that global warming is not a serious problem, and taking action on it would hurt American businesses.
That is simply not true. Most American businesses would not be affected at all, but a few giant corporations would have to stop polluting (and that would take a small portion of their enormous profits to do that). The problem though is that the congressional Republicans take their marching orders from those giant corporations -- and those corporations aren't willing to spend a penny, even to stave off an environmental disaster.
This makes the November election very important. The Republicans must be voted out of the majority in the U.S. House of Representatives, or we will have another two years (at least) of nothing being done about global climate change -- and we probably don't have much time left before we reach the tipping point (the point at which action will not help to stave off the coming environmental disaster).