A new New York Times/Stanford University poll finds that Hispanics “are far more likely than whites to view global warming as a problem that affects them personally. It also found that they are far more likely to support policies, such as taxes and regulations on greenhouse gas pollution, aimed at curbing it.”

A new New York Times/Stanford University poll finds an overwhelming majority of the American public, including nearly half of Republicans, support government action to curb global warming.

“In a finding that could have implications for the 2016 presidential campaign, the poll also found that two-thirds of Americans say they are more likely to vote for political candidates who campaign on fighting climate change. They are less likely to vote for candidates who question or deny the science of human-caused global warming.”

“Senate Republicans head-faked Democrats on climate change Wednesday, agreeing in a floor vote that the planet’s climate was changing, but blocking language that would have blamed human activity,” Politico reports.

“In a complicated maneuver that was the first politically perilous test for Senate Republicans, the new majority party split up the votes that Democrats had hoped would force the GOP into an awkward roll call on whether they believed in the science behind climate change — just hours after President Barack Obama slammed Republicans in his State of the Union address for dodging the issue.”

“Conservative distrust of Pope Francis, which has been building in the U.S. throughout his pontificate, is reaching a boiling point over his plan to urge action on climate change — and to do so through a document traditionally used for the most important papal teachings,” the AP reports.

“For months, Francis has been drafting an encyclical on the environment and global warming which he hopes to release by June or July. Encyclicals are written with the help of a small group of advisers working under strict secrecy. But in a news conference as he traveled last week to the Philippines, Francis gave his strongest signal yet of the direction he’ll take. He said global warming was ‘mostly’ man-made. And he said he wanted his encyclical out in plenty of time to be absorbed before the next round of U.N. climate change talks in Paris in November after the last round in Lima, Peru, failed to reach an agreement.”

A new Munich Re survey finds 83% of Americans now believe the climate is changing and 60% say the climate is changing due to man-made causes.

the survey findings “indicate that national sentiment over whether or not climatic changes are occurring has finally reached a tipping point.”

Wonk Wire: Former Secretary of State George Schultz is pushing Republicans for action on climate change.

“President Obama could leave office with the most aggressive, far-reaching environmental legacy of any occupant of the White House. Yet it is very possible that not a single major environmental law will have passed during his two terms in Washington,” the New York Times reports.

“Instead, Mr. Obama has turned to the vast reach of the Clean Air Act of 1970, which some legal experts call the most powerful environmental law in the world. Faced with a Congress that has shut down his attempts to push through an environmental agenda, Mr. Obama is using the authority of the act passed at the birth of the environmental movement to issue a series of landmark regulations on air pollution, from soot to smog, to mercury and planet-warming carbon dioxide.”

“During his earlier years in office, Obama never pushed the environment to the forefront of the national agenda. The economy took precedence. Then health care. At one point, toward the end of Obama’s first term, environmentalists counted the months between presidential uses of the term ‘climate change,'” Politico reports.

“But now, Obama is aiming to make global reduction of greenhouse-gas emissions one of the signature achievements of his presidency — with his “historic agreement” with China last week just the start of a series of administrative actions aimed at combating climate change. What changed, according to political and environmental sources close to the president, was Obama’s awareness that the environment is one of the few areas where a president can act unilaterally and to broad effect.”

Wonk Wire: How green is your state?

“The urgency with which activists (and scientists and the United Nations) view the threat of climate change is not matched on Capitol Hill. 2014 was meant to be change that, with environmental groups and one particular billionaire investing heavily in demonstrating that climate was an electoral winner. Instead, 2015 will arrive with environmentalists in a much worse position than they were even a year ago,” the Washington Post reports.

Wonk Wire: A dismal outlook for climate policy