Climate change is real, Canadians say, but they can’t agree on the cause

Canadians are far from a consensus on what causes climate change, a new public opinion poll shows.

Almost every Canadian surveyed in the online Insightrix Research poll said they believe climate change is happening, but a clear rift emerged on the more specific, and politically important, question of whether humans or natural factors, or some combination, is the catalyst.

According to the survey of 1,550 people released Wednesday, 32% of Canadians think climate change is occurring because of human activity, 54% think it is happening because of both human and natural causes, 9% think only nature is responsible, and 2% think climate change is not happening at all.

“Having such a high percentage attributing the cause of climate change to both human activity and natural variation is an especially interesting result because it shows that there isn’t a consensus in Canada about the causes of climate change,” said Briana Brownell, the lead pollster on the survey, which was conducted for IPAC-CO2 Research Inc., a Regina-based centre that studies carbon capture and storage.

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