The planet's warming, described by IPCC as unambiguous, can be observed in the exponential rise in atmospheric and oceanic warming, glacier melting and increasing sea levels (IPCC, 2014). Indeed, greenhouse gas emissions increased as a result of economic and population growth, have increased atmospheric concentrations of unknown carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide over the last 800,000 years (IPCC, 2014). The CO2 emissions are said to have risen by 4.7 per cent since the Paris Agreement (Berwyn, 2018), as the years 2015–2018 have been reported as the four warmest years. In 2018, global average temperature exceeded 1 degree above pre-industrial (1850–1900) levels (WMO, 2019) and if the current greenhouse gas emissions proceed in the same way, the world is predicted to reach the climate-risk threshold as early as 2030. But still the ambiguity in understanding the human-induced climate change has made it impossible for common man to understand its causes, impacts and take meaningful action against it (Gifford, 2011; Norgaard, 2011; Weber, 2010; Dunlap, 2013). Therefore, there has always been a big gap between the anthropogenic climate change view of the ordinary people and that of the scientists (Weber and Stern, 2011; Dunlap, 2013). In addition, several individuals have contributed to the dissemination of disinformation about the human-induced global warming that is being funded by the fossil fuel lobbies to promote climate skepticism and denial of climate change for their own reasons (Dunlap, 2013). Thus while the belief in climate change shows tremendous progress, it is difficult for researchers, practitioners, and policy makers to be on a common forum (Hornsey et al., 2016).
Awareness of the public's understanding of climate change is therefore required (Sullivan and White, 2019), as the consequences of climate change rely not only on the magnitude of the climate catastrophe, but also on the exposure and vulnerability of human and natural systems that again differ across time and space and rely on socio-economic, geo-political, demographic and environmental factors (IPCC, 2012). Despite this substantial variability in both human and natural environments, the effect of climate change on all continents and oceans is observed (IPCC, 2014; Rignot et al., 2019; WMO, 2019). Therefore, to stop the planet from being a permanent 'Hothouse,' a deeper understanding of the facts, perception and attitude about climate change is required from the global public opinion. Likewise, the deeper transformation of human values, equal allocation of wealth, behavioral improvements, reorientation of institutions, technical advances, enhancement of carbon sinks in the biosphere and new structures for governance will benefit (Steffen et al., 2018). In turn, it will produce a broad range of intimate, collective, and government-wide initiatives to resolve the global climate change crisis (IPCC, 2018; Goldberg et al., 2019). Therefore, in order to reduce the distance between climate change stakeholders, this survey asks some questions about the concept, causes, impacts and climate change mitigation steps, with the goal of providing data and knowledge that may be helpful to policy makers and stakeholders.