"Thirteen percent of Americans have never heard of global warming even though their country is the world's top source of greenhouse gases, a 46-country survey showed on Monday," according to Reuters.

This seems about right. I would say that about 10 percent of the American people have almost no idea what's going on. These are the people who never vote, never read the newspaper, don't know who the President is and couldn't pass the basic citizenship test given to immigrants. But they pollute the world like the rest of us.

Global warming is good for big business. According to Think Progress:

Global warming caused by fossil fuel emissions is rapidly melting the Arctic. Sea ice coverage this past March “was the lowest in winter since measurements by satellite began in the early 1970s,” and NASA-funded U.S. scientists believe in 30-50 years, “summer sea ice will have vanished from almost the entire Arctic region,” conditions not seen in the area in a million years.

For energy companies, this catastrophe means a “new era of oil and natural gas exploration in the region,” Greenwire reports:

The Arctic region contains a quarter of the world’s remaining oil reserves, experts estimate. It also contains massive natural gas fields in the Barents Sea, including Russia’s huge Shtokman field. “By 2040 or 2050, the Arctic Ocean will be navigable and that will mean significant developments very soon,” said ArcticNet research group head Martin Fortier.

European Environment Agency head Jacqueline McGlade warned that “the region’s opening could lead to another rush like the Klondike gold rush, which ‘could potentially destabilize’ the area and its 10 million indigenous inhabitants.”

One Republican Senator has said that global warming is the "greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people." And the Washington Post reported last year that "Scientists doing climate research for the federal government say the Bush administration has made it hard for them to speak forthrightly to the public about global warming. The result, the researchers say, is a danger that Americans are not getting the full story on how the climate is changing."

Some climate experts are meeting this week Paris to take up the issue further. Is anyone listening?

World scientists meet on global warming By ANGELA CHARLTON, Associated Press Writer Scientists from around the world gathered Monday in Paris to finalize a long-awaited, authoritative report on climate change, expected to give a grim warning of rising temperatures and sea levels worldwide.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is to unveil its latest assessment of the environmental threat posed by global warming on Friday.

As the panel meets, the planet is the warmest it has been in thousands of years — if not more — and international concern over what to do about it is at an all-time high.

"At no time in the past has there been such a global appetite" for reliable information on global warming, the panel's chairman, Rajendra Pachauri of India, told the conference.

Scientists are keeping quiet about the contents of the report, but say it is both more specific and more sweeping than the panel's previous efforts.

Early drafts of the document give a rosier picture than that of the last report, in 2001, foreseeing smaller sea level rises than previously predicted. But many top scientists reject the new figures as not new enough: They do not include the recent melting of big ice sheets in two crucial locations — Greenland and Antarctica.

That debate may be central at this week's meetings at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris. After four days of closed-door, word-by-word editing involving more than 500 experts, they will release the first of four major global warming reports by the IPCC expected this year.

"We're hoping that it will convince people that climate change is real and that we have a responsibility for much of it, and that we really do have to make changes in how we live," said Kenneth Denman, one of the report's authors and senior scientist at the Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis.

It has been an unusually warm winter in some parts of the world, and awareness of the consequences of climate change is growing.