From here:

Though the majority of Americans believe that global warming is actually occurring, many do not understand the reasons behind it, suggests new research released Thursday.

According to a study by Yale University researchers, 63 per cent of U.S. citizens believe that global warming exists. However, only 57 per cent know what the greenhouse effect is and only 45 per cent recognize the impact of carbon dioxide in trapping the earth’s heat.

The greenhouse effect involves the trapping of the sun’s heat by gases in the earth’s atmosphere, such as carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide and methane.

And 50 per cent of Americans understand that global warming is the result of human activities.

On the other hand, perhaps the average unwashed American just isn’t quite as gullible as his liberal betters would like him to be; rather like this physics professor:

For reasons that will soon become clear my former pride at being an APS [American Physical Society] Fellow all these years has been turned into shame, and I am forced, with no pleasure at all, to offer you my resignation from the Society.

It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare. (Montford’s book organizes the facts very well.) I don’t believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist.