Click on the photo above. It'll take you to a pretty amazing map out of the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication. Go play with it. Then come back.
Did you have fun? Pretty cool, isn't it? There's some good news in there: across the US, the majority of people believe climate change is happening. But it's also worth noting that most people don't believe that scientists think global warming is happening.
Now where did they get that idea?
Let's take a trip back in time to your high school science days. Remember the scientific method? Here's a very quick synopsis: a scientist asks a question, does research, constructs a hypothesis, tests it repeatedly using experiments, analyzes the outcome (which may mean changing the hypothesis and/or modifying the experiments) and shares the results.
Then the other scientists pick at it and probe it and run their own experiments and argue and question and debate. Why? To find any weak points, holes, mistakes. It's a way to test the strength of an hypothesis.
Scientists never prove anything. They only disprove hypotheses through constant probing and questioning. (And what might be a firmly-held scientific theory today could eventually be changed by the introduction of new information or technology.)
Looking at this from a climate change perspective, you can see where this poses challenges to the general public's understanding of the issue. For the majority of scientists, the facts support climate change and the idea that humans are contributing to global warming. But scientists are still - and should continue to be - probing and testing as part of the scientific method. That questioning can be seen by outsiders as uncertainty.
Journalists haven't helped this situation. There are a small minority of scientists who don't subscribe to climate change theory. In their quest to be fair, journalists have for years given this minority equal coverage, which contributes to the belief among the general public that scientists disagree - a feeling that shows up quite clearly on that map.
In short, science has a public perception problem when it comes to climate change. But it might help to make an analogy: to smoking, as the American Association for the Advancement of Science did in their March 2014 report:
The science linking human activities to climate change is analogous to the science linking smoking to lung and cardiovascular diseases. Physicians, cardiovascular scientists, public health experts, and others all agree smoking causes cancer. And this consensus among the health community has convinced most Americans that the health risks from smoking are real. A similar consensus now exists among climate scientists, a consensus that maintains that climate change is happening and that human activity is the cause.
It took a long time for people to realize that the scientists denying the extent of tobacco's harms were a small but incredibly powerful minority. We see that again with climate change. The vast majority of climate scientists - some numbers put it as high as 97% - agree that climate change is happening now. They may still be pushing and prodding and testing all the theories, but the basic facts all point to climate change. The deniers are again a small, vocal minority that shouldn't be allowed to confuse the issue any more. Asking questions is part of the process. Outright ignoring the science is not.