President Obama urges Americans to get serious about global warming. His plea may fall on deaf ears. Getty Images
June 25, 2013
President Obama calls climate change "the global threat of our time." Americans don't quite agree with that assessment.
In a Pew poll released Monday, only 40 percent of Americans said global climate change was a "major threat." That placed it behind financial instability, Islamic extremism, and China's influence — and just above "political instability in Pakistan" (37 percent) — on a list of other potential threats Pew tested.
While Americans didn't think too much of global warming, the world as a whole did. Among the 39 countries Pew surveyed combined, climate change was viewed as the number one threat.
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