Experiencing climate change: revisiting the role of local weather in affecting climate change awareness and related policy preferences

Abstract

Over the last few years, climate change has risen to the top of the agenda in many Western democracies, backed by a growing share of voters supporting climate protection policies. To understand how and why these changes came about, we revisit the question whether personal experiences with increasingly unusual local weather conditions affect people’s beliefs about climate change and their related attitudes. We first take a closer look at the theoretical underpinnings and extend the theoretical argument to account for the differential impact of different weather phenomena, as well as the role of prior beliefs and individual reference frames. Applying mixed-effects regressions to a novel dataset combining individual-level multi-wave panel survey data from up to 18,010 German voters collected from 2016 to 2019 with weather data from 514 weather stations, we show that personally experiencing unusual or extreme local weather did not shape people’s awareness of climate change as a political problem or their climate policy preferences in a sustained manner. Even among people who may be considered most likely to exhibit such effects, we did not detect them. Moreover, we demonstrate that the common modeling strategy of combining fixed-effects regression with clustered standard errors leads to severely reduced standard errors and substantively different results. We conclude that it cannot be taken for granted that personally experiencing extreme weather phenomena makes a difference in perceptions of climate change and related policy preferences.

Visualising the Relevance of Climate Change for Spatial Planning by the Example of Serbia

“…According to the analysed spatialplanning documents, the extent to which climate change was addressed depended on the spatial-plan coordinators, since the plans with independent chapters on climate change were led by the same spatial-plan coordinators. This is why raising awareness of this topic is relevant, not only for professionals, but also for teachers [85], the media [86], citizens [87], and all other stakeholders [88]. Sending a clear message is relevant in communication, and the visualisation suggested here can play an important role in communications between professionals and final users as a non-technical, easily understandable tool.…”

On climate fat tails and politics

“…Some analyses use data drawn from phone surveys (Brody et al, 2008;Brooks et al, 2014;Hamilton and Stampone, 2013;Howe et al, 2015;Krosnick et al, 2006) while others use surveys executed by large, well-know national organizations (Brulle et al, 2012;Deryugina, 2013;Donner and McDaniels, 2013;Egan and Mullin, 2012;Howe et al, 2015;Konisky et al, 2016) or internet-based surveys (Howe et al, 2015;Konisky et al, 2016;Myers et al, 2013;Zaval et al, 2014). Other papers use surveys based on countries outside of North America (e.g., Gärtner and Schoen (2021), who use a survey of Germans, and Lee et al (2015), who use survey data from multiple countries), or meta-analysis (Hornsey et al, 2016). Some studies use different samples obtained at multiple points in time (Brooks et al, 2014;Brulle et al, 2012;Egan and Mullin, 2012;Konisky et al, 2016).…”

“…A handful of analyses use data where respondents were surveyed at multiple points in time (Myers et al, 2013;Palm et al, 2017), yielding a panel dataset. The list of papers further falls into two sets: those that focus on local-or state-effects from climate events (Brody et al, 2008;Brooks et al, 2014;Egan and Mullin, 2012;Gärtner and Schoen, 2021;Kaufmann et al, 2017;Konisky et al, 2016;Krosnick et al, 2006;Myers et al, 2013;Palm et al, 2017;Zaval et al, 2014) and those that use information at a geographically larger, such as national, scale (Borick and Rabe, 2010;Brulle et al, 2012;Deryugina, 2013;Donner and McDaniels, 2013;Krosnick et al, 2006). Most papers in this strand of the literature focus on the effect of warmer temperatures, though Brooks et al (2014), Deryugina (2013) and Hamilton and Stampone (2013) ask whether either cooler or warmer anomalies matter.…”

Das Wetter ist politisch – Starkregen, Hochwasser und Flut vor der Bundestagswahl 2021

“…Diese Hypothese ist plausibel, da die Themen Natur, Umwelt und Klimaschutz nach Naturkatastrophen generell in der Wahrnehmung von Wählenden wichtiger werden (Böhmelt 2020;Baccini und Leemann 2021). Ob sich diese stärkere wahrgenommene Bedeutsamkeit jedoch in eine Wahlentscheidung für "grüne" Parteien übersetzt, ist noch weitestgehend eine offene Frage (Rudman et al 2013;Gärtner und Schoen 2021). Sie zu beantworten ist jedoch von großer Bedeutung für zukünftige Wahlen, da Extremwetterereignisse durch einen fortschreitenden Klimawandel vermehrt erwartet werden und damit potenziell wiederkehrend die Ergebnisse von Wahlen beeinflussen könnten (Junghänel et al 2021;Kreienkamp et al 2021).…”