Obama official: US climate views shifting amid wild weather

A senior Obama administration scientist said this year’s heat and Western wildfires are altering perceptions of climate change in the United States.

Jane Lubchenco, who heads the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said in Australia on Friday that many have previously regarded climate change as a “nebulous concept,” The Associated Press reports.

“Many people around the world are beginning to appreciate that climate change is under way, that it’s having consequences that are playing out in real time and, in the United States at least, we are seeing more and more examples of extreme weather and extreme climate-related events,” she said at a university in Canberra, AP reports.

“People’s perceptions in the United States, at least, are in many cases beginning to change as they experience something first-hand that they at least think is directly attributable to climate change,” she said.

Lubchenco “said that while it was impossible to attribute any single weather event to climate change, the pattern of extreme events was consistent with forecast consequences of increasing greenhouse gas emissions,” AP reports.

She is the second Obama administration official to weigh in this week on the nexus between the violent U.S. weather and climate change.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano linked climate change with the wildfires hitting Colorado.

Napolitano said “there’s a pattern here” as she noted the summer wildfires as well as the East Coast heat wave and the high-velocity winds that whipped through the mid-Atlantic late last week. (Click here for more on Napolitano’s remarks.)

A Washington Post poll released earlier this week, however, showed a drop in the percentage of Americans who see climate change as the most pressing environmental problem.