As Weather Extremes Get Worse, 37% Of Republicans Surveyed Deny Warming Exists - Up From 27% In 2017 [View all]

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The shift Leiserowitz and his colleagues detected was driven in large part by moderate and right-leaning Democrats. In 2017, less than one-third of those voters included preventing extreme weather among their top three reasons for desiring action, but by this year, half of moderate and conservative Democrats ranked it that highly. The opinions of moderate and left-leaning Republicans, however, stayed mostly unchanged, with just under 30 percent of those voters citing extreme weather as a top three reason to reduce global warming. Perhaps surprisingly, extreme weather even increased in relevance among conservative Republicans, with 21 percent listing it as a leading reason compared to just 16 percent in 2017.

But even as extreme weather became increasingly salient among the most conservative voters, far more of them selected the survey option “global warming isn’t happening.” In 2024, a full 37 percent of conservative Republicans denied the reality of climate change, compared to 27 percent just seven years earlier.

“People’s beliefs about climate change are driven predominantly by political factors,” said Peter Howe, an environmental social scientist at Utah State University who has worked with Leiserowitz in the past but was uninvolved in this analysis. The political and social circles a person occupies and the beliefs they hold not only mediate one’s overall opinions about climate change, Howe pointed out, but they influence how that person experiences extreme weather.

When Howe collected and reviewed studies analyzing the connections between extreme weather and personal opinions about climate change, he found that although those already concerned about the crisis often had their anxieties heightened by a natural disaster, those who were dismissive before the event often remained so, ignoring any potential connection to global warming. When Constant Tra, an environmental economist at the University of Nevada Las Vegas, and his colleagues published a similar study in May, he found that disasters don’t shove people toward concern and alarm in the way he expected. At best, “it kind of nudges people,” he said, but rarely moves someone from an entrenched position of categorical denial, especially when those around them aren’t concerned.

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https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2024/09/extreme-weather-has-had-a-surprising-impact-on-voters-attitudes-about-climate-change/