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Title: Beyond politics: Climate concern responds to changing temperatures in the American states

Citation Type: Miscellaneous

Publication Year: 2017

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Abstract: In the United States, many of the most important policies to address climate change have come from the states. As a result, there is a strong need to understand the drivers of public concern about climate change and support for policies to address it at the state level. But there is no existing measure of how public concern about climate change is changing at the state level; nor is there a consensus about the link between changes in the climate and public concern about global warming. Here, we develop a new, comprehensive index of the mass public’s latent concern about climate change in each state from 1999-2016. We show that climate concern peaked in 2000 and again in 2016. Next, we show that state-level climate concern is responsive to changes in average temperatures. But we find no evidence that annual changes in drought, wildfires, and precipitation have an effect on public opinion at the state level. Overall, these results suggest that continued increases in temperature are likely to cause public concern about climate change to grow in the future. Thus, a warming climate is likely to make it more feasible to pass new policies that address climate change.

Url: http://cwarshaw.scripts.mit.edu/papers/ClimateOpinion_170826_public.pdf

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Authors: Bergquist, Parrish; Warshaw, Christopher

Publisher: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Data Collections: IPUMS USA

Topics: Natural Resource Management

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