Climate change is happening, but not to me

April 4, 2017 6:40 AM

American attitudes towards climate change, mapped. The latest Yale Climate Opinion Map is out, mapping attitudes on a number of questions onto states, Congressional districts, metro areas, and counties.

Summarized in six maps.

Created by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and George Mason University's Center For Climate Change Communication.
Based on earlier research.
More.
(via)

posted by doctornemo (34 comments total)

Well, those numbers are depressing. I really thought the 'human activities' and 'most scientists know that global warming is happening' numbers would be higher.

And also the sheer number that don't think that global warming will affect them, personally explains a lot about their voting patterns.
posted by dinty_moore at 6:48 AM on April 4, 2017 [7 favorites]

I'm disappointed by those farm counties in Indiana and Ohio, who should damn well know better.
posted by leotrotsky at 6:49 AM on April 4, 2017 [9 favorites]

Interesting how you can still see the southern black belt if you switch to difference from national average view.

There's a lesson there about belief in global warming not having anything to do with either religiosity or traditional views on social issues* (like say, belief in evolution does), but instead being a pure, fact-free, tribe signifier.

A deeply disappointing lesson.

*Black folks living in cotton country in the south are not known for their progressive views on, say, gay marriage.
posted by leotrotsky at 6:54 AM on April 4, 2017 [4 favorites]

Hmm,

If you look by Congressional District, difference from national average.
On many issues there is one positive district surrounded by negative districts.

I'm kinda assuming that this is a gerrymandering thing. Because you draw your districts in such a way to include one district check full of "Those people" and five districts with a bare majority of decent right thinking Americans?
posted by Just this guy, y'know at 7:11 AM on April 4, 2017 [5 favorites]

Less than half of the people in Hancock county MS are worried about climate change. The same goes for 4 out of 9 coastal parishes in LA. These are places where land is disappearing quickly enough to be noticed within a few years, let alone lifetimes. If people reject the evidence they can see with their own eyes, I'm not sure how you can convince them.
posted by domo at 7:17 AM on April 4, 2017 [11 favorites]

I'm kinda assuming that this is a gerrymandering thing. Because you draw your districts in such a way to include one district check full of "Those people" and five districts with a bare majority of decent right thinking Americans?

It's partially that, and partially those are where the urban areas are. It's really easy to pick out Madison, WI; Jackson, MS and Albuquerque, NM on that map.
posted by dinty_moore at 7:30 AM on April 4, 2017 [1 favorite]

How do 70% of the people think global warming is happening, but only 49% think "most scientists believe global warming is happening"? The second one is simpler to observe. And why would you believe the first if you doubt the second?

Was this a mail survey? I'm wondering if seeing all the questions people were thinking they could check "yes" to the first and "no" to most of the others to signal that they are really, truly open minded but still deny the need to do anything.
posted by mark k at 7:40 AM on April 4, 2017 [3 favorites]

Those graphs are presented in a terrible way that is intended to distort the the effects.
I'm not disputing the figures in any way, but the presentation is awful and not at all scientific.
posted by Burn_IT at 7:40 AM on April 4, 2017

The 21% of respondents who know that global warming is happening, but don't believe that a majority of scientists have noticed it must be influenced by some kind of "scientists know nothing" meme.
posted by sfenders at 7:48 AM on April 4, 2017

Or they're taken in by the 'teach the controversy' meme, where they think that there is some sort of controversy, but side with the 'global warming is real' scientific camp. It's just that in reality, the global warming is real scientific camp is 99.9% of scientists.
posted by dinty_moore at 7:53 AM on April 4, 2017 [3 favorites]

Just to note that with the ongoing clusterfuck of Republicans and conservatism in the US, it's not really possible to tell who actually believes global warming isn't happening or that scientists don't think that it is from people who know full well that it is, and that scientists know this and agree about this, but are just performing conservatism for the pollster.

Some of that may be what's going on with the people who agree that it's happening but disagree that scientists agree that it's happening, if the scientist bit pushes the performative button harder.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 8:02 AM on April 4, 2017 [2 favorites]

Those graphs are presented in a terrible way that is intended to distort the the effects.

How do you mean? Because they aren't cartograms, or because they use the same absolute scale for every item?

You can get almost-a-cartogram by just selecting congressional districts.

Hell, I was just happy they MRP-ed the results for smaller subunits.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 8:04 AM on April 4, 2017 [3 favorites]

It's worth clicking through to look at the "methodology" and "survey questions" tabs in the first link.

How do 70% of the people think global warming is happening, but only 49% think "most scientists believe global warming is happening"? The second one is simpler to observe. And why would you believe the first if you doubt the second?

The contrast they're showing is 49% think "most scientists think global warming is happening" versus 28% think "there is a lot of disagreement" versus the remaining 23% answered either "don't know" or "most scientists think global warming is not happening". It's not immediately obvious why they lumped "don't know" with "scientists think it's not happening," but my guess is that it's because not enough people responded "scientists think it's not happening" to make it a distinguishable group.

Given that, what those two questions are saying is only 30% of Americans are either global warming deniers, or are unsure whether it's real, and 28% of Americans don't believe there's a scientific consensus on global warming. Seems consistent to me. Presumably the reason so many more people think global warming is happening than think scientists believe global warming is happening is because a lot of people don't know what scientists think.
posted by biogeo at 8:14 AM on April 4, 2017

Wow. The disconnected between how many people do not think "global warming will harm me personally" versus harm people in the US, developing countries, future generations, plants and animals. Humanity, you are a riot (which is good preparation, I suppose).
posted by kokaku at 8:18 AM on April 4, 2017 [2 favorites]

Media failure (likely influenced by bubble effect, but still): 76% hear about global warming monthly or less.

Excellent news: 75% support regulating CO2 as a pollutant.

The Policy Support section definitely gives me hope. Clean energy technologies have made such gains that they are now being limited by oversupply problems on our antiquated grids, and so focus has been moved to upgrading the grid infrastructure to handle transient loads and energy storage technologies. California and Hawaii are leading the way on this, but even Texas(!) has substantial renewables online now in the form of wind.

In the current political climate we're going to have to rely much more heavily on the states rather than the feds, but we can still make major progress.
posted by Existential Dread at 8:20 AM on April 4, 2017 [1 favorite]

Well, those numbers are depressing. I really thought the 'human activities' and 'most scientists know that global warming is happening' numbers would be higher.

It's funny, I had the opposite reaction. This survey indicates that Americans on the whole are much more on board with the idea that anthropogenic climate change is real than I would have thought. Despite the fact that billionaires are throwing their fortunes at disinformation campaigns to convince people that climate change isn't real, and these campaigns have clearly been effective at creating confusion around certain aspects of the discussion (e.g., making people unsure of scientists' position on the issue when it is overwhelmingly settled), the public overall seems to be both coming around to the idea that climate change is real, and prepared to support policy addressing it. Note also that people dramatically favor these policies despite the misconception that climate change does not affect them personally. I see these as reasons for hope. Obviously more still needs to be done to inform the public on the facts of climate change and the scientific consensus around it, so malicious actors can't prey on people's uncertainty to cause them to vote and act against what they know to be right (c.f. the 2016 U.S. election, and Brexit), but this suggests that the public education campaign should be focused less on convincing people that climate change is real, and more on building confidence in that position to immunize them against the next "but her emails!"-style disinformation blitz.
posted by biogeo at 8:31 AM on April 4, 2017 [17 favorites]

"Wow. The disconnected between how many people do not think 'global warming will harm me personally'..."

I'm not sure this is a fair criticism because if I were asked that question, I would hesitate to answer "yes". "Harm" seems like a strong word. If it were "affect me negatively", I'd almost certainly say "yes", and that it already has. But "harm" implies, to me, something both quite specific and sufficiently severe such that I'm uncertain as to what that would be. I can think of many, many things where the effects are or will be significant but ambiguous -- like, you know, extreme weather: the incidence is increasing overall because of global warming, but you can't really specify "global warming" as the cause for any specific incident. Economic harm is another example where there's certainly all sorts of economic harm caused to people as individuals, including me, by global warming, but it's mixed-in with many other factors, too.

Even where the harm to individuals can be relatively direct and severe -- such as, for example, south Florida flooding or western wildfires -- it still is amorphous and chaotic enough that a given person so affected might not feel that global warming is the specific, proximate cause.

Personally, I think that this ambiguity is both a negative and a positive. It's a negative, obviously, in that global warming and its effects are not quite proximate enough that the human mind is likely to establish an "imminent danger" judgment. In this it's like other things that are diffused in time and space. On the other hand, this diffusion means that, increasingly over time, it becomes more and more evident everywhere. Which is what I think has happened with American public opinion -- I see fewer conservatives outright denying global warming these days than fifteen years ago. It's pretty impossible to deny that it's happening at this point, and I think this has been and will continue to feed sociopolitical anxiety.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 8:55 AM on April 4, 2017

I'm not sure this is a fair criticism because if I were asked that question, I would hesitate to answer "yes".

Same. Given where I live and how much money I make, I'm quite insulated from the harm of climate change. That doesn't mean for one second that I don't care about it, though or think that yes, eventually, after I am worm food, even people exactly like me will indeed begin to be harmed. But if someone asked me to honestly rate the harm I think I'm going to experience personally over the next 30 or so years, I'd say it's probably fairly negligible. But I'm not a monster, so I understand that just because something doesn't affect me personally right now, doesn't mean that I shouldn't be alarmed at how it's currently affecting millions of people and will in the future affect millions more. But those are separate questions.
posted by soren_lorensen at 9:06 AM on April 4, 2017 [1 favorite]

Can anyone really be insulated from the harm of climate change? I'm in good shape but it wouldn't take much for a major storm fueled by warmer ocean waters to mess up my city in ways that would certainly harm me (for some degree of harm, even if it's the harm of material loss or loss of time). Maybe harm really is a bad word to use there and 'negatively affect' is better. Or maybe someone I know would be affected and that would be the harm. Or maybe there would be a migration from somewhere to my neck of the woods and that would create harm.
posted by kokaku at 9:10 AM on April 4, 2017 [1 favorite]

And by anyone, I mean anyone not of extraordinary means. They probably can be insulated for longer than the rest of us. But even they will miss coffee and chocolate and other nice things that will no longer be readily available.
posted by kokaku at 9:11 AM on April 4, 2017 [1 favorite]

In the strict economic sense, everyone is already being harmed: we've launched several military interventions since the 70s at least partly motivated by ideas about securing fossil fuel reserves to go into a future resource conflict. Average temperatures are less stable than historical norms now, so that subtly increases everyone's costs, from farmers, to anybody who drives a car or uses any machine with components designed only to function optimally within certain expected ranges of ambient temperature variability.

With the costs of all the industrial inputs becoming less predictable and higher on average, that has to be putting some as yet unquantified pinch on everything else.

Since these are complex, nonlinear systems we're talking about here (market pricing being determined according to some mysterious nonlinear function that circularly affirms whatever spot price someone is willing to pay for a good or service as a rational and reasonable choice), the effect is probably already a lot bigger than people realize intuitively.
posted by saulgoodman at 9:16 AM on April 4, 2017 [7 favorites]

Can anyone really be insulated from the harm of climate change?

Of course they can. All the harm you listed to yourself was theoretical, so it sounds like you are. For a lot of people it will continue until they are dead.

In the strict economic sense, everyone is already being harmed

No, not everyone. Some are making out like bandits.
posted by ODiV at 9:25 AM on April 4, 2017

.
posted by twsf at 9:28 AM on April 4, 2017

To expand on saulgoodman's point, the notion of 'harm me personally' has built-in blinders. When climate change alters the monsoon patterns in South Asia, and 150 million Bangladeshis who don't have enough food start to migrate elsewhere, the whole world turns upside down...
posted by twsf at 9:31 AM on April 4, 2017 [2 favorites]

If the South Asian monsoons fail, India and Pakistan will fight a nuclear war once the waning flow of the Indus is no longer sufficient to feed both populations.

If we get to 2050 without this happening, I would honestly be surprised.
posted by [expletive deleted] at 9:36 AM on April 4, 2017 [4 favorites]

All the harm you listed to yourself was theoretical

The question in the survey was 'will you be harmed'... a speculative question about climate change. Apparently many people are unable to imagine that the climate change they believe is happening and will happen and that they also believe will harm many others, that that very same change, will harm themselves as well. Blinders don't even begin to describe it.
posted by kokaku at 10:10 AM on April 4, 2017 [1 favorite]

The belief that "global warming will not harm me personally" is probably closely related to "I can monetize global warming to my benefit". After all, Mar-A-Lago is not a beachfront property... yet.
posted by oneswellfoop at 10:17 AM on April 4, 2017

Denial ain't just a river in Egypt.
posted by gottabefunky at 10:36 AM on April 4, 2017

You think that many Americans are assuming they can monetize global warming to their benefit? I guess it fits with the whole temporarily embarrassed millionaires theory.

Apparently many people are unable to imagine...

The question wasn't, "Can you imagine..." People are in large part agreeing that climate change is real and looking to support policies to address it. I guess if you want to spend time chastising them for not being "realistic enough" about the potential effects, that's a thing you can do. Call me pragmatic, but all the blinders in the world plus a smaller carbon footprint and voting for action on climate change is still better than acceptance plus two kids, a dog, a house, and a car.
posted by ODiV at 10:42 AM on April 4, 2017 [1 favorite]

If you talk to people who work in insurance, they'll straight up tell you that Global Climate Change - fires, storms, rising sea levels - is being factored in to actuarial planning. Actuaries are all about, and only about, accurate prediction. We're already paying the costs in insurance premiums. For most people, it's just not obvious yet.

The map was interesting in places like south Florida and south Texas, where rising seas will make a huge difference, but where I would have guessed there would be politically-based denial.
posted by theora55 at 11:09 AM on April 4, 2017 [2 favorites]

I'm not sure this is a fair criticism because if I were asked that question, I would hesitate to answer "yes". "Harm" seems like a strong word. If it were "affect me negatively", I'd almost certainly say "yes", and that it already has. But "harm" implies, to me, something both quite specific and sufficiently severe such that I'm uncertain as to what that would be.

I mean, you might starve to death.
posted by Automocar at 1:01 PM on April 4, 2017 [1 favorite]

Actually, I think the "climate change will harm me personally" map is disingenuous for a different (and less depressing) reason!

The median age in America is 38, and depending on polling methodology, this poll may skew a little older than that. For people who are 50-55 and don't live in, say, Florida, climate change probably won't harm them very much, personally. I mean, sure, winters will be milder and the growing season longer and insurance premiums and food prices will keep going up and so on, but that doesn't really change how they live their lives, right? And certainly it'll affect their kids a lot, and I think a lot of people care about that, but that wasn't what the question was asking. (Notice that the map for "global warming will harm future generations" is something like 70%!)

(I haven't actually looked into the polling methodology yet to see if they account for this. Work day, etc. But I think this one is less horrible than it seems upon first blush.)
posted by ragtag at 1:07 PM on April 4, 2017 [2 favorites]

I'm 52, BTW, and live in the American midwest. I'm fairly confident, though far from certain, that climate change won't cause me to starve to death.

The reaction here is weird and disappointing. I've long been arguing for a maximalist assessment of AGW -- I think that 6C is already baked into the cake and I expect refugees, resource wars, mass starvation, and worse to arise from global warming. I don't expect that the worst of this to come to pass before, say, 2040 and probably it will peak in the second half of the century, so there's definitely some "I won't be alive then" involved in my assessment. If I were 20 years old, I'd be much more likely to answer "yes" to this question.

I don't doubt that there are many Americans who are in some denial or just don't recognize the ways in which global warming will likely personally harm them. In my case, though, I'm simply reporting what my most informed and honest answer to this question is -- which is that while I am certain that climate change will negatively affect me in many ways (and already has in some respects - there's a reason why those of us from the mountain southwest are very aware of global warming), the wording with "personal harm" causes me to want to answer the question by looking for things like, well, starving to death. And even then, as in the case of severe weather, I'm still a little wary of specifying and personalizing climate change to that extent -- I mean, this is what is happening when the deniers argue that AGW is disproved when there's a blizzard.

There definitely is some tragedy of the commons failure of reasoning going on in this, even in my case. Humans don't deal well with probabilities and we are particularly poor at evaluating probabilistic, diffused risk. I should mention that I am personally at the "not being fearful" end of the spectrum with regard to most people -- it's amazing to me that people I know worry about being randomly shot while driving through a bad part of town and yet don't worry about being in deadly car accident. I evaluate my risk of being personally and directly harmed by either global warming or terrorism to be relatively low and it's not something I worry about. I also evaluate my risk of being indirectly harmed by the cascading effects of global warming and terrorism to be quite high, as I think is true for almost everyone. But "personally harmed", for some reason, connotes to me with climate change what being injured in a bombing means with regard to terrorism. Very definite and direct.

None of this is to say that social and economic destabilizing effects of climate change aren't very serious and deserve to be seen as the #1 threat to global stability and well-being for the forseeable future. I think that is the proper assessment and that public policy should be set accordingly. But this also raises the similar question about terrorism -- which I (and some others here) have not correspondingly recognized as a threat to global stability. People worry about the direct effects of terrorism, but what we should really be worrying about is all the cascading stuff in response to it. I would expect a similar "personal harm" question with regard to terrorism would likely result in a "yes" for a surprisingly unrealistic number of Americans -- it seems to me that each of these issues resonate with cultural fears strongly for different parts of the population and thus this strong resonance causes many people to personalize the risk more strongly than they would otherwise.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 5:36 AM on April 5, 2017

So the massive international public relations campaign to confuse the public about global warming has worked as intended. So far.
posted by MrVisible at 7:36 AM on April 5, 2017