Weather and Climate Change<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Will Oremus puts his finger on a sensitive topic: the correlation of weather and views on climate change. Before the financial crisis hit, Americans were\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/jesuscreed\/2012\/07\/18\/weather-and-climate-change\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Weather and Climate Change\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Will Oremus puts his finger on a sensitive topic: the correlation of weather and views on climate change. 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Before the financial crisis hit, Americans were pretty sure that the globe was warming, and that humans were causing it, and that it was kind of a big deal. As the economy slumped, Americans decided that climate change wasn\u2019t actually happening\u2014and even if it was, it wasn\u2019t our fault. And now, after a flurry of wild weather\u2014deadly tornados, floods, droughts, an uncommonly mild winter, and recent heat waves\u2014U.S. residents are back to believing that global warming is real. But we\u2019re still hesitant to take the blame.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

These generalizations are based on a series of Yale University studies over the last few years. According to Yale, Americans\u2019 belief in global warming fell from 71 percent in November 2008 to just 57 percent in January 2010 but\u00a0 rebounded to 66 percent by this spring<\/a>. The findings mirrored those of the National Survey of American Public Opinion on Climate Change, which showed belief in global warming bouncing from 65 percent in 2009 to 52 percent in 2010 and back up to 62 percent this year<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

What accounts for the rebound? It isn\u2019t the economy, which has thawed only a little. And it doesn\u2019t seem to be science: The percentage of respondents to the Yale survey who believe \u201cmost scientists think global warming is happening\u201d is stuck at 35 percent, still way down from 48 percent four years ago. (The statement remains just as true now as it was then\u2014it\u2019s the public, not the scientists, that keeps changing its mind.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

No, our resurgent belief in global warming seems to be a function of the weather.\u00a0 A separate Yale survey this spring found that\u00a0 82 percent of Americans had personally experienced extreme weather<\/a> or natural disasters in the past year. And 52 percent said they believed the weather had been getting worse overall in recent years, compared to just 22 percent who thought it had gotten better.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Maybe it was all that priming, but 69 percent of respondents in that March poll went on to say that they believed global warming was affecting the weather in the United States. And that, of course, was before the Colorado wildfires, and before the most recent wave of storms and heat in the Midwest and Northeast, which have brought\u00a0 renewed media attention to climate change<\/a>. If you polled the country today, the number might well top 70 percent.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

To the science-minded, it might be disconcerting that the weather drives Americans\u2019 beliefs about climate change. After all, scientists\u2019 models have been showing and predicting climate change for decades. And global warming\u2019s relationship to any given weather trend is probabilistic, not causal,\u00a0 as David Roberts explained<\/a> in a thoughtful Grist post recently.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\u00a0<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"