Testing the Influence of Recent Weather on Perceptions of Personal Experience with Climate Change and Extreme Weather in New York State

Abstract

The general public’s perceptions of climate change may be shaped by local climate impacts through the mechanism of experiential processing. Although climate change is a long-term global trend, individuals personally experience it as weather from moment to moment. This study assesses how New York State adults’ overall perceptions of their personal experiences with the effects of climate change and extreme weather (surveyed in early 2014) are related to recent weather conditions. This research is unique in that it examines multiple types of weather: temperature and precipitation, over 1 day or 1 week, quantified both as relative and nonrelative measures. Respondents’ perceptions that they had personally experienced climate change or extreme weather significantly increased with warmer relative (percentage of normal) minimum temperatures on the day of the study. Maximum temperatures and total precipitation levels were not significant predictors of perceptions of personal experience, either on the day of the study or over the preceding week. Experiential processing had a smaller effect on perceptions than motivated reasoning, the influence of preexisting ideas. Respondents who believed that climate change was happening agreed more that they had personally experienced it or extreme weather, and this effect increased for individuals who thought that climate change was anthropogenic, as opposed to naturally caused. Of the sociodemographic factors assessed here, political party, gender, and region were significant predictors, while age and education were not.

How will climate change shape climate opinion?

“…Alternatively, some studies ask participants if they have personally experienced the effects of climate change itself [37,[57][58][59]. In some studies, survey questions about personal experience are also combined with external observational data on weather conditions or trends [15,20,32,36,38,39,46,50,60,61].…”

“…A subset of studies focuses on how people perceive weather or climate conditions at the local level. Rather than using beliefs about global climate change as a dependent variable, these studies examine whether people perceive the climate in their local area to be getting warmer, whether recent seasons are warmer or colder than normal, or related local climate trends [25,35,36,38,39,50,60,61,71,[79][80][81].…”

“…Multiple studies have found that these subjective experiences of local weather or climate conditions are associated with broader climate opinions and political affiliation or ideology. In short, people who are already more concerned about global warming are more likely to think they have experienced its impacts, or have experienced weather conditions consistent with global warming [35,36,38,39,61,71]. These trends are typically attributed to motivated reasoning or related phenomena.…”

“…[46]) and annual or seasonal trends based on temperature minimums, maximums, or means (e.g. [61,67]).…”

“…Some studies forego theoretical groundings and limit their focus to documenting empirical associations (e.g. [10,66,73]), however, many [16,48,59,61,77,83] contextualize their work using one of two psychological theories: dual-process theory [97], which emerged from the cognitive-experiential self theory [98], and construal level theory (CLT) [99].…”