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Title: Does Global Warming Increase Public Concern About Climate Change?

Citation Type: Miscellaneous

Publication Year: 2018

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Abstract: There is no consensus about whether exposure to a changing climate influences public concern about climate change. In this paper, we examine the link between climate change and public opinion using a comprehensive index of the mass public’s latent concern about climate change in each state from 1999-2017. The index aggregates data from over 400,000 survey respondents in 170 polls. These new estimates of state-level climate concern enable us to exploit geographic variation in locally experienced climate changes over an extended time period. We show that climate concern peaked in 2000 and again in 2017. At the national level, trends in public opinion clearly mirror trends in temperature. Moreover, climate concern is modestly responsive to changes in state-level temperatures. Overall, our results suggest that continued increases in temperature are likely to cause public concern about climate change to grow in the future. But a warming climate, on its own, is unlikely to yield a consensus in the mass public about the threat posed by climate change.

Url: https://dusp.mit.edu/sites/dusp.mit.edu/files/user/attachments/ClimateOpinion_180322_public.pdf

User Submitted?: No

Authors: Bergquist, Parrish; Warshaw, Christopher

Publisher: MIT

Data Collections: IPUMS USA

Topics: Natural Resource Management, Other

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