It’s something of a truism among those concerned about climate that as people suffer more severe and frequent extreme weather events and wrestle with the impacts of global warming on their daily lives, they’ll come to understand the problem viscerally. As a result, they’ll be eager to take action. In other words, many climate activists believe that extreme weather can be a wake-up call for anyone, even if advocates and academics can’t change the stubborn opinions of naysayers.
The data is contrary to that.
Over the past seven years, as the effects of climate change have begun to blanket the world in smoke and storm, natural disasters have indeed become the first thing that comes to mind when voters think about the most important reasons to take action on climate change. But these concerns are not shared evenly across the political spectrum.
According to an analysis by Yale University’s Climate Change Communications Program, 37 percent of voters surveyed this year listed preventing extreme weather as one of the top three reasons for addressing the crisis, up from 28 percent seven years ago. For Anthony Leiserowitz, Yale program director, this shift reflects the fact that while many Americans perceive climate change as a certain psychological distance, the increasingly shared experiences of smoky skies, life-threatening heat, and earth-cracking drought mean that “climate change is no longer distant in time or space, but very much here and now,” he said.
Mainstream media is making that increasingly clear to their audiences, thanks to the emerging field of “attribution science,” which allows researchers to explain connections between global warming and specific weather systems in real time.
The shift that Leiserowitz and his colleagues found was driven primarily by moderate and right-wing Democrats. In 2017, fewer than a third of these voters ranked preventing extreme weather among their top three reasons for wanting to act; by this year, half of moderate and conservative Democrats ranked it that highly. Meanwhile, opinions of moderate and left-wing Republicans have remained largely unchanged, with just under 30% of these voters still ranking extreme weather as a top three reason for curbing global warming. Perhaps surprisingly, extreme weather has also become more important among conservative Republicans, rising to 21% from just 16% in 2017.
But even as extreme weather becomes more prevalent among the most conservative voters, they are far more likely to say that global warming isn’t happening: In 2024, a whopping 37% of conservative Republicans deny the reality of climate change, up from 27% just seven years earlier.
“How people think about climate change is largely driven by political factors,” said Peter Howe, an environmental sociologist at Utah State University who has previously collaborated with Leiserowitz but was not involved in the analysis. The political and social groups people belong to and the beliefs they hold not only influence their overall opinions about climate change, but also how they experience extreme weather, Howe said.
Hau said, Extreme weather and personal opinions Research on climate change has found that natural disasters often increase anxiety in people who are already concerned about the crisis, while people who downplayed the crisis before the disaster are more likely to continue to be concerned, ignoring potential links to global warming.
Environmental economist Constant Tola of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and his colleagues Similar studies In May, he found that disasters don’t incite as much anxiety and fear as he had expected: At best, they “nudge people,” he said, but they rarely move people out of stubborn denial, especially when others around them aren’t worried.
This dynamic mirrors a groundbreaking experiment conducted in 1968, in which college students were placed in a room with two actors. When smoke drifted into the room and the actors pretended nothing was wrong, the subjects rarely became alarmed or reported the smoke. In fact, they often just assumed the smoke wasn’t dangerous.Smoke room experimentIn the current climate change crisis in America, climate deniers are playing the role of trying to convince everyone around them that everything is OK. Over time, these views spread and positions harden.
But the smoke-filled room experiment and Leiserowitz’s own research make it clear that anxiety can also be contagious.
But shouting from the clocktowers isn’t enough, Leiserowitz added. “It’s really important that people understand the risks accurately,” he said, without exaggeration or ignoring the fact that every little thing matters. A dispassionate assessment of risks needs to be combined with a search for existing solutions that can be easily and efficiently implemented and can have a meaningful impact today.
