Critical Ink 2012

Lucie Ahn, James Flynn, Roland Huang

Global climate change is the alteration of the earth’s climate system, and ocean acidification pertains to a decrease in pH due to dissolving carbon dioxide into the ocean. Though scientists view the two as equally important, the public is less aware of ocean acidification than global climate change. Also fewer people understand scientific basis for both than those who are simply aware of the two. We focus on gathering information about 1) the difference in people’s understanding of ocean acidification and global climate change and 2) how people acquire their knowledge. To assess baseline knowledge, a survey was conducted through Mturk, an online survey database. Examining the results of a survey, we anticipate that there will be a positive correlation between the public’s knowledge of global climate change and ocean acidification. Also we hypothesized that most people obtain their knowledge from televised news sources such as CNN and ABC.

Emily Auger, Rowena Gan, Christine Zhang

Ocean acidification is the absorption of atmospheric carbon dioxide caused by the burning of fossil fuels, which is resulting in the lowering pH of the world’s oceans. We are interested in the public opinion on climate change and ocean acidification issues on a global scale and the correlation between the awareness of ocean acidification and perceptions of global warming. To answer these questions, we designed a comprehensive survey testing knowledge and awareness of climate change and distributed our survey on Mturk to collect responses from participants worldwide. A statistical analysis of this data provides useful information on the relationship between perceptions of global warming and ocean acidification. Considering demographics may help us to understand the dynamics that form public perception of ocean acidification. This survey offers us useful information which we can use to inform more people of ocean acidification, one of the more urgent environmental issues of the 21st century.

Michael Kaelin, Crystal Owens, Bruno Semenzato

Ocean acidification, which has recently surfaced in the public view, is the process through which atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) is absorbed by the oceans, making them more acidic. Researchers at Duke University conducted a survey to explore public attitudes towards reducing CO2 emissions. Respondents were found from a global pool using the survey site Mechanical Turk. The survey first investigated baseline public opinion of CO2 mitigation. The public was then presented with a brief educational overview of the effects of global climate change and ocean acidification. Results demonstrate how education affects public perception of climate change mitigation. A strong correlation between education and support for mitigation would imply that educating the public on ocean acidification is the best way to increase support for environmental action.

Jeannie Chung, Andrew Luo, Amber Zhang

The objective of the project is to evaluate the public’s knowledge about global warming and ocean acidification.  In order to find out how aware different demographic groups of people are of ocean acidification , their prospective opinions on different solution methods to it, and how their opinions have changed after the survey. We represented the demographics through standard qualities regarding race, age, gender, financial status, religion, political affiliation and education.  We distributed the survey through Mturk, an online global pool of participants.  The results of the survey may help us gain insight of how the awareness of climate change and ocean acidification would change with different demographic factors.  We can use the results to form better strategies to raise awareness of climate change and ocean acidification of different groups accordingly, thus motivate them to take a course of action.

Spencer Dahl, Jingwei Deng, Ji Soo Yim

As global warming and climate change has gained traction as a pressing issue in the scientific world, the general public has learned about and formed opinions on the phenomenon. However, a lesser-known environmental concern has arisen amidst the climate change discussion – ocean acidification. Given the general public’s exposure to climate change, we questioned the prevalence of similar measures to educate the public on the issue. The purpose of our survey was to evaluate the general population’s awareness of ocean acidification and its implications. We presented questions concerning climate change, the causes and effects of ocean acidification, political identification, and personal opinion towards ocean acidification in order to juxtapose responses and find a pattern that will represent the general public view on ocean acidification. After conducting the survey, we found that the majority of our respondents lacked substantial knowledge on the issue with half of them having scarcely heard of the phenomenon at all. Their lack of exposure to the subject was further demonstrated in their incorrect responses on questions concerning the causes and effects of ocean acidification. Although the majority of the respondents lacked knowledge on the subject, their opinions on the matter tended to show concern towards the implications of ocean acidification and optimism towards individual and governmental initiatives to mitigate its effects. Based on the survey results, we concluded that while ocean acidification has an insufficient audience, there is potential for that to change if measures are taken to increase awareness on the issue.

Daniel Li, Jesus Sambrine, Brandon Sassouni

Global warming and ocean acidification, the uptake of carbon dioxide by the earth’s oceans, are both serious environmental problems. The main objective of this research project is to understand how one’s perception of global warming relates to one’s knowledge and awareness of ocean acidification. An extensive survey was created to assess people’s knowledge and perceptions of global warming and ocean acidification. This survey was distributed using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, which allowed people from all over the world to respond to the survey. The anticipated result from this project is that people who had a solid knowledge of global warming are more likely to know about ocean acidification compared to those who do not and that global warming is more of a concern to the public than ocean acidification is.

Adam Berkowitz, Sam Jactel, Tae Eun Kim

Ocean acidification is a relatively new issue to the climate change debate but has the potential for devastating consequences on marine life and global economies. The purpose of this investigation was to understand the relationship between public knowledge of this issue and its correlation with the support of carbon dioxide mitigation policies.  Through the use of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk proprietary software, a survey was created and administered to a representative sample of the global population comprised of 971 individuals.  The results were then compiled and filtered, and showed that when individuals are more informed about the topic of ocean acidification, they are more inclined to support legislation on carbon mitigation.  These results can be extrapolated to indicate the possible behavior of the world’s population regarding climate change in general.  The research here presented therefore recommends increased education to garner more interest for environmental issues and more support for legislation attempting to reduce anthropogenic causes of climate change.

Winnie Biwott, John Godbey, Alex Pfiffner

Ocean Acidification (OA) describes the uptake of anthropogenic carbon dioxide into the ocean’s waters, which ultimately lowers the ocean pH.  While many individuals throughout the world are becoming more aware of the effects of climate change, many more have never heard of OA or the challenging problems it presents.  This project seeks to determine whether a correlation between socioeconomic and demographic factors and ocean acidification awareness (OAA) exists.  Using Mechanical Turk (MTurk), a survey will be administered to thousands of individuals all over the world with the hope of achieving a statistically significant quantity of data.  Parsing the data could identify a correlation between factors such as education, ethnicity, or location and OAA.  Education, and location by extension, will likely contribute more to OAA than ethnicity, wealth, religion, and other less influential factors.  With a large enough sample size, underlying trends may begin to precipitate and will suggest the overall relationships between OAA and demographics.