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As droves of activists head to Copenhagen, Denmark, to pressure international leaders to take drastic measures on global warming, here in the US, nine Senate Democrats have decided what they would like President Obama to agree to. The Senators include Arlen Specter and other centrist Democrats who wrote a letter to the president suggesting that “all major economies should adopt ambitious, quantifiable, measurable, reportable and verifiable national actions.” A White House Spokesperson announced that the President agrees with most of what has been laid out in the Senators’ letter. But many key nations have already signaled that there will likely not be a legally binding treaty on global warming emissions until next year. Meanwhile, the Senate as a whole seems deeply divided over a global warming bill to cut emissions here in the US. Democratic Senator John Kerry has teamed up with Senator Lieberman and Republican Lindsey Graham to work out a compromise bill that they may unveil in the next several weeks. But the efforts in Washington DC and Copenhagen come at a time when the US public has sharply increased its skepticism over whether global warming is really a human-made phenomenon. A new Harris poll found a 20% drop in the percentage of Americans who believe that greenhouse gases are warming the earth. Today, just 51% of Americans have faith in what the vast majority of the scientific community has consensus on compared to 71% two years ago.

GUEST: Rick Piltz, Director of Climate Science Watch, a watchdog project of the Government Accountability Project