Last year was the fourth-hottest in United States history and generated the second-highest number of climate disasters, killing 688 people, according to a NOAA report ( E&E News PM, Jan. Global warming is already having severe impacts. “The impact of these direct experiences is beginning to take hold as a significant factor in people’s perceptions and decisionmaking.”Įxtreme weather events last year and in 2020 were particularly “brutal,” Leiserowitz said, and more climate-focused media coverage and political discourse appear to be convincing people that climate change is happening and affecting them. “We think that signal is finally emerging out of the noise, if you will,” he added. “For years, we found no influence of these direct experiences because it was so swamped by politics,” Leiserowitz said in an interview. But his team’s survey of 1,018 people in April and May indicates that Americans’ outlook on warming is being shaped by their experience with extreme weather. Political affiliation remains the major influencer of people’s perceptions of climate change, with Republicans being more likely to be skeptical of climate change than Democrats, Leiserowitz said. While those numbers are down slightly from “all-time highs” reported in September 2021, when that summer’s extreme weather was fresh on people’s minds, it’s reflective of a broader pattern: Increased exposure to extreme weather appears to be shaping the way Americans think about climate change, said Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale climate program and one of the principal investigators on the report.
Roughly three-quarters of respondents to a recent poll said global warming is affecting weather-related issues in the United States, including extreme heat, wildfires, drought and rising sea levels, according to a report released yesterday by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication. CLIMATEWIRE | As extreme weather wracks much of the globe, large majorities of Americans believe that in many cases, climate change is to blame.