The vast majority of Ohio State students are convinced global warming is happening, according to a survey of 3,568 full-time OSU undergraduate students.

The random, scientifically valid survey represents the views and knowledge of the university’s 35,719 full-time, undergraduate students.

Ninety percent say global warming is happening and is a result of either human activity or natural causes.

The debate among students is over the cause of global climate change rather than whether it exists, said Erik Nisbet, an associate professor in the School of Communication and the survey’s principal investigator.

This is not the case for the general U.S. population. Just 67 percent of people age 18 and older say they believe global warming is happening, according to a recent survey conducted by the Yale Project on Climate Change and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication.

Nisbet said the reason for the difference between students and the general population could be the divide between those who are college educated and those who aren’t.

“College students are usually more aware [of global climate change] and would be more likely to say it is happening,” Nisbet said.

The survey, conducted at OSU’s Columbus campus, shows 63 percent of students think global warming is a result of human activity while 27 percent think it can be explained mostly by natural causes.

Reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change offer perspective on the factors that contribute to global climate change.

“Humans have become the single largest climate forcing agent,” said Jason Box, associate professor in the Department of Geography, in an e-mail. “Increasing solar output, according to ICPP, represents less than 20 percent of the observed warming. Climate models reproduce the observed past and thus seem reliable in now-to-next-century projections.”

Knowledge about global warming plays a role in where students stand on the issue, the survey shows.

Participants answered a series of questions regarding global warming as part of the survey, which was conducted during two weeks in March. Students who answered more questions correctly were more likely to attribute humans to the cause of global warming.

Seventy-two percent of students who answered each answer correctly said it is caused mostly by human activity, while 21 percent said it is a result of mostly natural causes.

More than half of students who answered the least amount of questions correctly said global warming is mostly a result of natural changes in the environment. Nearly 8 percent said they do not think global warming is happening at all.

“The role factual knowledge plays in the belief of whether or not global climate change is driven by human activities depends largely on an individual’s ideology and political orientation,” Nisbet said.

Though the majority of students agree that scientists say global warming is happening, more than a third think there is disagreement among scientists.

Carol Landis, an education and outreach specialist for Byrd Polar Research Center, said climate scientists are generally in agreement that climate change is happening and that it’s happening more rapidly than it has in the past.

Students were divided over which is more important: a better environment or a better economy. Slightly more than 56 percent agreed that working to protect the environment was more important.

Of several issues being discussed in Washington, students ranked the environment second-to-last in importance. But when considering what the government should do about global climate change, students prioritized the creation of “green” jobs and saving endangered plants and animals just below developing alternative energy, reducing reliance on foreign oil and losing jobs and trade to other countries.

However, students are not very confident the government will enact policies to curb global warming. Nearly 67 percent said government policies can reduce global warming, but it is unclear whether the government will do what is necessary, and 20 percent said government policies cannot reduce global warming.

Regardless, students aren’t worried that global warming will affect them and their families as much as they think it will affect others in the U.S. Thirty percent think changes in the environment will harm people in the U.S. “a great deal,” while only 21 percent think it will harm them and their families “a great deal.” Seventeen percent think it will not harm their families at all but just 11 percent feel the same about people in the U.S.

Landis said people’s tendency to believe that the U.S. has a superior position in science and technology might explain why students aren’t very worried.

“We have the luxury in this country that when things begin to happen, we have the technology and we will fix the problem,” Landis said. “It is logical that most people don’t think [global climate change] will harm them individually.”

Landis said the importance for education on global climate change is growing.

She said a loosely organized group on campus including members from the College of Food, Agriculture and Environmental Sciences, OSU Extension and Byrd Polar Research Center is working to raise awareness of climate change and promote education.

“Educating about what climate change means helps people to understand that they do make a difference,” Landis said. “Our choices about energy are the bottom line.”

OSU is home to extensive climate change research, especially at the Byrd Polar Research Center, an international leader in polar and alpine climate research.

Paolo Gabrielli, a research scientist at Byrd Polar, is also a principal investigator for a project that studies ice cores to reconstruct past climates.

The group of professors, researchers and graduate and doctoral students participating in the project travel across the globe and to some of the highest mountains in the world to study glaciers, Gabrielli said.

They will be traveling to the Antarctic Peninsula in December and New Guinea next year.

“The last glaciers in the Pacific are located right in the middle of the Himalaya [mountains] and the Andes [mountains],” Gabrielli said. “We will drill several ice cores down to the bedrock and try to reconstruct past El Niño and La Niña phenomena.”

Understanding the past will help predict the future, he said.

“There is a growing importance for research because we still don’t understand very well the mechanism of climate change and especially the direction of natural and anthropogenic forces,” Gabrielli said. “What we need is to have better idea of natural [forces] to study how they can really interact with anthropogenic [human] forces like those such as greenhouse gases.”

Michelle Sullivan can be reached at [email protected].