Pirate's Cove

Maybe people aren’t cultists and realize that bad weather happens, and has always happened? Or, perhaps for those who are cultists they aren’t willing to give up their own big carbon lives

Study: Extreme weather may not lead to increased support for climate action

For some Americans, the signs of global warming are everywhere. In 2020 alone, wildfires broke records across the West, hurricanes fueled by abnormally warm ocean temperatures battered the Southeast, and a Death Valley weather station recorded a temperature of 130 degrees Fahrenheit — possibly the hottest daily high ever reliably documented on Earth. Now, drought has taken hold in much of the West, teeing up what is expected to be an extremely active fire season.

Climate scientists have been warning for decades that global warming will lead to more extreme weather. And so as more Americans start to personally experience disastrous weather events, it’s reasonable to ask whether they will support aggressive climate action.

The short answer is already clear: not necessarily.

Oops.

The signal of climate change is difficult for people to notice against the noisy background of day-to-day and seasonal changes in weather.

30+ years of spreading awareness and this is the best they can do?

The Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, or YPCCC, the publisher of this site, has been using nationally representative surveys for 12 years to track which Americans think they have personally experienced global warming.

The data show that Democrats and Republicans living in the same states or counties — or even sharing the same roof — can be a world apart when it comes to perceived experience with global warming (Fig. 1). While 60% of Democrats nationally say they have personally experienced global warming, only 22% of Republicans agree.

30+ years of spreading awareness, doomsaying, attempting to scare people, and this is the best they can do? I’ll admit that I have experienced global warming, because it is happening, it’s just that it is primarily natural, with a small portion that is globally anthropogenic and another small percent being from land use and the urban heat island effect.

We found that only one type of weather affected Americans’ beliefs that they had experienced global warming: hot, dry days. When hot, dry days persist for a long period of time, drought conditions arise. In particular, the intense heat and lack of rainfall that affected Texas in the Midwest in 2011, and which turned into a severe drought, stands out clearly in the study’s climate data (Fig. 2, top panel). This drought was also associated with extreme wildfires in Texas, which burned about 4 million acres that year, doubling the previous record. (snip)

In our study, people did not link local increases in heavy rainfall with global warming. Given that the connections between global warming and precipitation patterns are more complex than those for temperature alone, perhaps this is not surprising. Yet the relationship is important and has major consequences for our economy and health. Scientists recently calculated that the impact of global warming on Hurricane Sandy includes a price tag of $8 billion from the flooding damage. But many Americans don’t understand how carbon pollution could cause an increase in flooding and hurricane damage. For them, the dots have not been connected yet between cause and effects.

It’s no wonder I call it Hotcoldwetdry: these doomsday cultists say that the un-scientific, climate cult term “carbon pollution” is causing everything, just like a cult would.