Knowledge, Perception and Attitude in Relation to Climate Change: A Cross-sectional Survey

A cross-sectional online survey was conducted using multiple online channels, where hundreds of responses were recorded from seven different countries, in order to provide a better understanding of the global public opinion about the awareness, perception and attitude about climate change. The results reected that majority of people believe in the actual happening of Climate Change both by natural as well as anthropogenic causes. While most respondents believed in the anthropogenic causes of climate change, some people still displayed their condence in the natural causation of climate change and thus armed their awareness of its natural causes. There was however, a difference of opinion regarding the mechanism behind the greenhouse effect. The respondents also provided their opinion on the impact of carbon aerosols on the atmospheric temperature. Further, the respondents were optimistic on the issue of climate change reversal and had also preferred some mitigation steps such as the use of geo-engineering over adjusting to the existing impacts of climate change. Although, people conrmed their belief in the human-induced nature of climate change, yet their agreement of having faced bizarre things about climate change like the lack of consensus among the scientists and climate change being a hoax shows their unawareness about the appropriate knowledge and the propaganda against this planetary emergency. Therefore, this study could prove helpful for policy makers and other stakeholders as it shows how much is done and how much more is pending.


Introduction
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 CO 2 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 climaterisk 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 di cult 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 bene t (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.

Methodology
We performed a six-month cross-sectional survey in order to understand the global public opinion about the knowledge, perception and attitude in relation to climate change. An anonymous self-administered equestionnaire was posted and reposted on the social networking platforms like email, WhatsApp, Facebook, Twiter, Instagram, Researchgate, Academia, and Linkedin; besides sharing the link with our personal contacts. Although the e-questionnaire was distributed among the residents of our country, we didn't constrict our survey as residents from some other countries also participated in the survey.

Questionnaire
We developed an e-questionnaire to assess the global public opinion about the knowledge, perception and attitude in relation to climate change. The questionnaire was based on similar questionnaires on the perception and knowledge of climate change (Thompson 2017). The questionnaire collected some basic demographic data on age, sex, ethnicity, and education level; and included questions on knowledge, perception, impacts, and mitigation practices on climate change and collected the responses using a combination of free text, Likert and multi-level response scales. Questions on knowledge were used to assess the people's general understanding about climate change. Questions on perception were used to assess their understanding towards the causes of climate change. Questions on mitigation practices were used to assess the actual compliance to the different measures. In order to make the survey user friendly, almost about eighteen questions were Yes/No type while as only two questions were multiple choice type. We used an easy to understand terminology to ensure that the said questions are understood by people from all spheres of life.

Data Analysis
Data were fed into SPSS version 25 (SPSS Inc Chicago USA) for statistical analysis. The demographic variables and the percentages of the categorical variable were illustrated by the descriptive statistics.
Further Chi square test was used for testing the relationship between the demographic and the categorical variables.

Respondents' demographic characteristics
A total of 171 respondents (aged from under 19 to above 55) from seven different countries including India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Uzbekistan, Turkey, Nigeria, and America completed the survey. Most of the responses were obtained from India (92.3%, n = 158), followed by Pakistan (4.6%, n = 8) and one each from the rest of the countries. Further, maximum responses were obtained from students (35%) followed by teachers (31.5%) and researchers (10.5%) and males (63.1%) surpassed females in the survey.

Respondents' knowledge about the concept and impacts of climate change
Although climate change is characterized by the global warming, geographic regions may experience different local changes (such as droughts, oods, storms and sea level rise). Questions therefore included the general perception of the concept and impacts of climate change and the responses of the respondents towards the questions (Table 1) shows that a clear majority of 94.1% respondents agreed that the climate change is happening in real sense and it directly corresponded with the next observation of the study wherein 98.2% of them showed their belief in global warming. The belief was further strengthened by the majority's belief on impact of climate change on glaciers and ice sheet (95.9%) and on oceans other than rising sea levels (95.3%). There was a statistically signi cant association between the educational background (χ 2 = 6.995, p = 0.005), profession (χ 2 = 7.785, p = 0.005), gender (χ 2 = 5.034, p = 0.022) and the knowledge and perception of climate change. Respondents with a good education background and research were more accurately aware about the concept, causes and impact of climate change. Respondents' knowledge towards the causes of climate change The knowledge towards the causes of climate change and the mechanism behind the greenhouse effect (Table 2) shows that majority of the respondents (64.9%) agreed on the natural causation of climate change which was contrary to the response of another question in which the majority (97%) of the respondents agreed upon its anthropogenic causation. 95.9% of the respondents agreed upon the contribution of CO 2 and CH 4 in climate change, however, the response on mechanism behind the greenhouse effect was varied between absorption of infrared light emitted by the earth (49.1%), Ozone depletion (30.4%) and direct absorption of sunlight (20.4%). Furthermore, majority of the respondents (97.6%) also con rmed their knowledge on the impact of soot on atmosphere, with 74.2% of them specifying the impact as the increase in temperature.

Discussion
This study generally showed that the respondents were well aware about the concept, effects, causes and mitigation measures of climate change. The results suggested that students, teachers and researchers were the maximum responders, possibly because of their higher concerns for the environment and the society at large. Meanwhile, the reason males outnumbered females could be because, women like other minorities doubt their abilities (Selm et al., 2018) in deciding about such crucial issues. Coming to the actual study, majority of the respondents con rmed their belief in climate change which could be for the fact that they showing that people are ready to pay money for carbon-labeled products. Furthermore, a majority of the respondents also con rmed their belief in the impact of sulfate aerosols on the atmospheric temperature and supported the use of the same in lowering the atmospheric temperature by applying geo-engineering principles as these aerosols are proven to mimic the volcanic aerosols in causing the global cooling

Conclusions
The ndings indicate that people across nations are aware about the actual happening of climate change and they do know what are the major causes, impacts and mitigation measures of climate change.
People are also aware of the impacts of climate change on glaciers, ice sheets, rise in sea levels and other less popular oceanic impacts which could possibly be ocean acidi cation, increase in water temperature, coral bleaching etc. Time is still left for reversing the climate change and people are willing to take part in climate action rather than rejecting the opportunity as the duty of world leaders alone. Further, sulfate aerosols, solar geoengineering, afforestation, change in life style, shifting energy resource use, spending of time and money were noted as some common strategies to reverse the already happening climate change rather than letting it happen further and adapting to it.

Declarations
Ethical Approval This article does not contain any studies involving animals or humans performed by any of the authors. Further the authors declare that they have no con icts of interest.

Consent to Participate
'Not Applicable'