Doctoral Dissertation Research: Fingerprints of Global Warming in Worldwide Public Attitudes

Pennsylvania State Univ University Park, University Park PA

Investigators

Abstract

This research will use local climate variability as the stimulus for a natural experiment to test for a predicted relationship between individual experience of anomalous local climate and attitudes about the magnitude of long-term climate change. From Russia's unprecedented 2010 heat wave to the northeastern U.S. "snowpocalypse," abnormal weather patterns are often cited as evidence for or against the existence of climate change. The narratives surrounding these events suggest that public opinion may be influenced by recent and ongoing weather, but this hypothesis has not yet been systematically investigated. In this project a broad multi-country collection of public opinion polls and academic surveys is coupled with historical climate indicators using a new methodology, spatial microsimulation, to create a model of the effect of local climate variability on worldwide public attitudes. The global model is then used to generate predictive comparisons of future patterns of public attitudes under the local climate changes projected by the IPCC emissions scenarios. This research is designed to advance both the methodology of Bayesian spatial analysis and the theoretical understanding of human risk perception and adjustment to chronic hazards. This novel methodology takes advantage of a broad collection of existing data to address critical theoretical questions about human perception and response to climate change. Few previous observational or experimental studies have addressed the role of manifest climate experience in attitude formation about the effects of climate change. The research is fundamentally interdisciplinary, integrating theory from psychology with climatology and social science data using methods derived from Geographic Information Science. Do local climate anomalies influence individual attitudes about climate change? If so, how will attitudes change over time as the impacts of global warming are increasingly experienced? Although the ways in which individuals experience environmental phenomena play a major role in attitude formation and behavioral response, it is unclear both how people perceive chronic hazards such as climate change and to what extent those experiences influence attitudes and behaviors. To address this gap, this research seeks to explain the effect of individual climate experience on attitudes about climate change. If the experience of climate variability is perceived as positive or negative evidence of global warming, it may influence individual attitudes about climate change and decisions to mitigate or adapt. Individual behavior change represents a major source of potential greenhouse gas emissions reductions, and the results of this project will help to explain the determinants of attitudes that shape such changes. By combining the results with future climate projections, this project can facilitate prediction of positive or negative feedbacks between climate change impacts, risk perceptions, and mitigation behavior. Knowledge about the determinants of such behavior will be a critical component of climate change policy and risk communication.