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Global warming attitudes can shift with the winds
A new study suggests that many people still don’t understand the difference between daily weather and long-term climate.
By Summit Voice
FRISCO — Despite all the recent media coverage and public discussion of climate change issues, some people’s beliefs about global warming are still shaped by day-to-day weather, according to a new study by sociologists, geographers and climatologists. The study may illustrate one challenge facing climate scientists trying to differentiate between sensible weather and long-term climate shift.
Perhaps not surprisingly, those attitudes about climate change are also linked to political persuasion.
“We find that over 10 surveys, Republicans and Democrats remain far apart and firm in their beliefs about climate change. Independents fall in between these extremes, but their beliefs appear weakly held — literally blowing in the wind,” said Lawrence Hamilton, professor of sociology and senior fellow at the Carsey Institute, and New Hampshire state climatologist Mary Stampone, also an assistant professor of geography at UNH.
“Interviewed on unseasonably warm days, independents tend to agree with the scientific consensus on human-caused climate change. On unseasonably cool days, they tend not to,” Hamilton and Stampone said.
Hamilton and Stampone used statewide data from about 5,000 random-sample telephone interviews conducted on 99 days over two and a half years (2010 to 2012) by the Granite State Poll. They combined the survey data with temperature and precipitation indicators derived from New Hampshire’s U.S. Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) station records.
Survey respondents were asked whether they thought climate change is happening now, caused mainly by human activities. Alternatively, respondents could state that climate change is not happening, or that it is happening but mainly for natural reasons.
“Independent voters were less likely to believe that climate change was caused by humans on unseasonably cool days and more likely to believe that climate change was caused by humans on unseasonably warm days,” Hamilton said. “The shift was dramatic. On the coolest days, belief in human-caused climate change dropped below 40 percent among independents. On the hottest days, it increased above 70 percent.”
In conducting their analysis, the researchers took into account other factors such as education, age, and sex. They also made adjustments for the seasons, and for random variation between surveys that might be caused by nontemperature events.
The research is presented in the article “Blowin’ in the Wind: Short-Term Weather and Belief in Anthropogenic Climate Change” in the American Meteorological Society journal Weather, Climate, and Society.
Filed under: climate and weather, Environment, global warming Tagged: | Carsey Institute, climate change, climate science, global warming beliefs, Independent (voter)
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Since the election, we see a return to the Democratic Party approach to propaganda concerning independent voters. Independent voters, say Democrats, are wishy washy, as opposed to Republican propaganda, which says that independent voters have no right to vote in the private club primary elections held by their party. What all party propaganda concerning independent voters neglects is that there are now more independent voters than Democrats, members of the largest party, and party politicians have found no way to keep Americans from registering as independent voters. Their best efforts in this regard always result in increased independent voter registration.
Party politicians cannot understand this phenomenon, seeing that they have always been successful in preventing independent voters from being candidates for public office. They do that by party control of federal courts, which have ruled consistently that independent voters are the only Americans not protected by the provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Be that as it may, we are watching the last days of party control in America, as the two major parties have become too polarized to provide any sort of leadership and too contentious with each other to leave in power. The success enjoyed by Andrew Jackson and Martin van Buren in eliminating independent voters from American politics in the 1830′s led to the Civil War. The steady increase in the number of independent voters in our time moderates party contentions. Both parties prefer letting the number of independents increase to another Civil War So with regard to party contentions over climate change, independent voters are free to do whatever they choose to do with regard to any particular point of contention. Party members are not. Party members are required to do what other party members do. That is why political parties exist in the first place.
I hear you loud and clear. I’m an independent voter, have been for a long time and I agree with you that the calcification of the two-party system has done a lot of harm to American political life. I just thought the key point of the study — that independent voters’ beliefs about climate change shift with daily weather — was really interesting. Does it say something about the mindset of independents to begin with? I know wishy-washy has a bit of a bad connotation, but I couldn’t resist using it in a headline, and I do think it’s accurate in this context.
Thank you for your reply. With regard to climate change, I am probably a little more extreme in both directions than most people. First of all, I used to work in a sawmill before all sawmills supplied by logs from federal land were shut down by federal court decisions. So it irritates me to see 500,000 acre forest fires being used to prove there is global warming. More than half of the trees in Arizona, where I live, have been allowed to burn since 2000. On the other hand, the day will come that will burn like an oven, etc. I just don’t see it as an issue particularly profitable to independent voters at this time.
What independent voters need to focus on right now is voter registration, where they have had the two major parties on the run since the 1980′s, and independent candidates for office, which they are prevented from having by federal court decisions handed down since they began to increase in numbers, which designate independent voters as the only voters not protected by the Voting Rights Act of 1965. But, say the courts, independent voters can receive that protection if they just join political parties.
Independent voters are at a crossroads. Since Americans backed the strong party in the two-party system in the last election, independent voters have to decide whether they are going to become part of party promotion or remain an opposition to party control. The change I see since this election is that everything about independent voters now seems to be propaganda designed to show the hopelessness of being independent.