By Karlyn Bowman
Special to washingtonpost.com's Think Tank Town
Friday, August 31, 2007 12:00 AM

Americans think global warming is real and serious. Poll after poll shows that there are not many climate skeptics left. The issue has received an enormous amount of media attention over the past several years, but it still doesn't rank at or near the top of issues people want the president and Congress to address.

In January, when the Pew Research Center updated its yearly poll on priorities for the president and Congress, global warming ranked twentieth of twenty-three issues. Pew described concern about the issue as "lukewarm." The poll was taken before the latest wave of media attention to global warming, but other more recent polls show the same pattern. In a survey taken in late May and early June by The Washington Post, the Kaiser Family Foundation, and Harvard University, the issue ranked eighth of ten issues examined. And it isn't just sentiment in the polls. According to the Pew Project on Excellence in Journalism, the media ratings for the July "Live Earth" concerts orchestrated to draw attention to the issue were "disappointing," with smaller than normal Saturday summer viewership. Why doesn't the issue have a bigger public opinion footprint?

First, many people see global warming as a problem for the future. Other issues such as the war in Iraq and health care seem more immediate to larger numbers of people. For most people, there have been few tangible manifestations of global warming. Polling on environmental issues over the past several decades shows that people are usually most concerned about problems they can see in their communities. Weather patterns seem unusually severe in many parts of the country, but the vagaries of the weather are a familiar story.

Another possible explanation relates to changing views of the media. When the environment emerged as a powerful political issue in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the media had more credibility than it has today. The media has joined government, labor and big business as powerful institutions about which the public is skeptical. In Gallup polls taken yearly since 2001, around three in ten have said the seriousness of global warming is generally exaggerated, while around 35 percent say it is generally underestimated. In Pew's most recent media usage survey from 2006, just 20 percent said that they believed all or most of what they read in Time magazine, for example. Time's overheated tag line for its April cover story on global warming, "Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid," probably only confirms the skeptics' suspicions about exaggeration.

It is also possible that Americans think they have been heard on the issue and will let politicians, interest groups and others take over. Again, the manner in which the environment emerged as an issue is instructive. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Americans decided that a clean and healthful environment was important to them. Once they agreed on the ends policy should serve, most people pulled away from the debate about the means -- that is, exactly what kinds of legislation should be enacted to ensure environmental progress. They had neither the time nor the knowledge to get involved in complex debates about ambient air quality or energy options. Americans aren't indifferent, but they are inattentive. Their benign neglect is a backhanded compliment to representative democracy, an indication of confidence in the process. Lobbyists and activists can't pack their bags and go home. The debates in Washington on global warming will be as intense as ever, but most Americans will be on the sidelines. Interest groups will claim they have public opinion on their side in terms of how to respond to global warming, but how you word questions on complex hypothetical policy choices often determines the answers.

Finally, there may be another reason Americans have not elevated the issue. Most politicians younger than 81-year old House Environment and Public Works chairman John Dingell grew up with the environmental movement. We're all environmentalists now, and it is hard to make a political issue out of a commitment shared by most of the population. George Bush's marks on virtually every aspect of his presidency are negative, including his handling of global warming, and Democrats lead the Republicans in every poll as the party better able to handle the issue. In a new Newsweek poll, 68 percent say Bush hasn't done enough, but in another question only 4 percent say they will vote on the basis of global warming. Nearly six in ten say the issue will be one of a number of issues that will be important to their vote. There is little evidence from the polls that taking on George Bush or the Republicans on the issue will make it a top-tier issue or increase its political weight.

Karlyn Bowman is a senior fellow at AEI. where she studies public opinion.