Quiz on climate change: Know more about the climate than the most?

January 16, 2019

What, exactly, are the Two-degree target is? For the limitation of the temperature rise per year? Or total? And if so, in comparison to what? You would have the answer? Many of the participants in a representative survey could not do it.

do you Believe, dear reader, that you are better informed than the average Population? Test your Knowledge in our Quiz. It contains: – a slightly shortened and updated – the same questions that have been used for the representative study by a team from the University of Hamburg. The participants reached in the middle 2,74 correct answers to all nine questions have to be answered only four out of 1,000 correctly. Try it!

Yes, the Team from the University of Hamburg, on whose behalf the survey was conducted, was himself surprised by how few people in Germany have the right to answer fundamental questions about the climate. This was in the autumn of the year 2015. But then the climate summit in Paris took place, and while the topic of climate protection was in the Radio and television, in Newspapers and on the net almost everywhere. As you could expect, all the reporting from Paris will have an impact on the level of knowledge of the people.

As the researchers but the survey, in the course of the summit, and again after the end of repeated, the results were sobering: Some of the population had learned only to current topics (Nature Climate Change: Brüggemann et al., 2017). So did not know before that 28 percent of the respondents the aim of the Paris meeting (namely that the world should to a successor Treaty to the Kyoto Protocol some), afterwards, it was 36 percent. But “you got to no background knowledge about climate policy”, as the Team of Michael Brüggemann, a Professor of climate communication, and a member of the Hamburg excellence cluster Pieces, noted.

And with background knowledge of what is meant here is not academic knowledge. Rather, the participants were asked something like: How has the global greenhouse gas emissions since 1990? What is the name of an important climate protection instrument? Or: What is the Two-degree target?

Whereas, in December, at the climate conference in Katowice on the implementation of the Paris agreement was negotiated, Brüggemann and his Team the same questions of 1,000 representative sample of people in Germany. In the results, the existence of TIME ONLINE, exclusively, a positive snapshot: “two current issues – the significance of the Coal phase-out for Germany’s emissions targets, and the problems of the current conference in Poland – the Germans understood relatively well informed,” says communication scholar Carolyn De Silva-Schmidt from Bruges’s research team.

however, if you Look on the existing basic knowledge, which have been revised in 2015 and 2018 on the basis of seven similar points, the picture changes. “Apart from one question to the previous development of the global CO2 emissions, the Germans have acquired no additional Knowledge,” says De Silva-Schmidt. “Quite the contrary!” At almost all points the level of knowledge had decreased in the population. Even concepts that had been for a long time present in the public debate, such as the Kyoto Protocol, were soon forgotten. “The fact that the climate is decreasing knowledge, this finding is new,” says De Silva-Schmidt.

The people have little to

learned “I had expected that the people learn more about climate policy,” says Michael Brüggemann. “What surprised me is that the years of simmering debate on climate change has not been sufficient even for that purpose, in order to keep the 2015 existing background knowledge.”

time OnlineKartenJoe Raedle/climate change! What does that mean?

global warming is threatening the world, but how exactly? We will explain weather, climate and why the change is so dangerous.

Please enable JavaScript to this map story shop to view …Please enable JavaScript to load map view history …