Document Type

Article

Journal/Book Title

Environmental Research Letters

Publisher

Institute of Physics Publishing Ltd.

Publication Date

10-22-2019

Award Number

NSF, Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences 1753082

Funder

NSF, Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences

Volume

14

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Issue

11

First Page

1

Last Page

17

Abstract

As climate change intensifies, global publics will experience more unusual weather and extreme weather events. How will individual experiences with these weather trends shape climate change beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors? In this article, we review 73 papers that have studied the relationship between climate change experiences and public opinion. Overall, we find mixed evidence that weather shapes climate opinions. Although there is some support for a weak effect of local temperature and extreme weather events on climate opinion, the heterogeneity of independent variables, dependent variables, study populations, and research designs complicate systematic comparison. To advance research on this critical topic, we suggest that future studies pay careful attention to differences between self-reported and objective weather data, causal identification, and the presence of spatial autocorrelation in weather and climate data. Refining research designs and methods in future studies will help us understand the discrepancies in results, and allow better detection of effects, which have important practical implications for climate communication. As the global population increasingly experiences weather conditions outside the range of historical experience, researchers, communicators, and policymakers need to understand how these experiences shape-and are shaped by-public opinions and behaviors.

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