A world split into red and blue: A report on what influences belief in climate change

The discussion of climate change has now become a controversial topic. Whether global warming is human-caused is considered a matter of opinion, though there is ample scientific evidence to say the contrary. The research contained within this paper focuses on the correlation between education and opinion on climate change in the United States. Further focus was directed into the issue by contrasting different levels of education, the impact of political affiliation, government financing of initiatives related to climate change, media reportage of climate change, and the influence of location on attitude towards climate change. The goal of this research was to present what impacts belief in climate change, and to what extent. The primary methods of research were the pandas, matplotlib, and seaborn libraries of Python 3 to create and merge data frames from the relevant data we found, and represent correlations visually in plots. It was determined that high school graduation, overall, has little to no correlation with belief in climate change (varying slightly based on partisan status). However, in 2015, the percent of those with higher-level degrees correlated strongly with belief that climate change is happening. It was hypothesized that this was due to an increase in research on and media coverage of climate change, as well as current events (such as the beginning of the presidential campaign, and the adoption of the Paris climate agreement). In 2016, a sharp divide in opinion was seen based on political party, and much less correlation with education, possibly because of the 2016 presidential election, the limiting of access to government data, and the spread of the idea of "fake news." This reveals that partisan divide plays a huge role in the conversation around climate change, and is a step that needs to be overcome as individuals move to solve the environmental crisis.