Uncertain climate: An investigation into public scepticism about anthropogenic climate change

This study presents a detailed investigation of public scepticism about climate change in Britain using the trend, attribution, and impact scepticism framework of Rahmstorf (2004). The study found that climate scepticism is currently not widespread in Britain. Although uncertainty and scepticism about the potential impacts of climate change were fairly common, both trend and attribution scepticism were far less prevalent. It further showed that the different types of scepticism are strongly interrelated. Although this may suggest that the general public does not clearly distinguish between the different aspects of the climate debate, there is a clear gradation in prevalence along the Rahmstorf typology. Climate scepticism appeared particularly common among older individuals from lower socio-economic backgrounds who are politically conservative and hold traditional values; while it is less common among younger individuals from higher socio-economic backgrounds who hold self-transcendence and environmental values. The finding that climate scepticism is rooted in people's core values and worldviews may imply a coherent and encompassing sceptical outlook on climate change. However, attitudinal certainty appeared mainly concentrated in non-sceptical groups, suggesting that climate sceptical views are not held very firmly. Implications of the findings for climate change communication and engagement are discussed.     

Climate change scepticism and public support for mitigation: Evidence from an Australian choice experiment

Public scepticism surrounding climate change is an obstacle for implementing climate change mitigation measures in many countries. However, very little is known about: (1) the nature and sources of climate change scepticism; and (2) its influence on preferences for climate change mitigation policies. In this paper, we investigate these two issues using evidence and analysis from an Australian public survey and choice experiment. The study has three key findings. First, the intensity of scepticism varies depending on its type; we observed little scepticism over the cause, trend and impact of climate change and widespread scepticism over the effectiveness of mitigation measures and global co-operation. Second, cause and mitigation scepticism play significant roles in determining public support for climate change abatement. Respondents who believed in human-induced climate change were significantly more supportive of mitigation. Likewise, respondents who believed that mitigation would be successful in slowing down climate change were significantly more likely to be supportive. Third, the general public tend to give the benefit of the doubt to supporting mitigation. Those who expressed higher uncertainty about climate outcomes were more supportive of mitigation than others with similar expectations but lower uncertainty.     

What is climate change scepticism? Examination of the concept using a mixed methods study of the UK public

The holding of doubts about climate change is often referred to as ‘scepticism’. However, there has been a lack of clarity in previous work as to what exactly this scepticism comprises. We integrate data obtained from discussion groups and a nationally representative survey, to interrogate and refine the concept of climate change scepticism with respect to the views of members of the public. We argue that two main types should be distinguished: epistemic scepticism, relating to doubts about the status of climate change as a scientific and physical phenomenon; and response scepticism, relating to doubts about the efficacy of action taken to address climate change. Whilst each type is independently associated by people themselves with climate change scepticism, we find that the latter is more strongly associated with a lack of concern about climate change. As such, additional effort should be directed towards addressing and engaging with people's doubts concerning attempts to address climate change.     

Uncertainty, scepticism and attitudes towards climate change: biased assimilation and attitude polarisation

‘Scepticism’ in public attitudes towards climate change is seen as a significant barrier to public engagement. In an experimental study, we measured participants’ scepticism about climate change before and after reading two newspaper editorials that made opposing claims about the reality and seriousness of climate change (designed to generate uncertainty). A well-established social psychological finding is that people with opposing attitudes often assimilate evidence in a way that is biased towards their existing attitudinal position, which may lead to attitude polarisation. We found that people who were less sceptical about climate change evaluated the convincingness and reliability of the editorials in a markedly different way to people who were more sceptical about climate change, demonstrating biased assimilation of the information. In both groups, attitudes towards climate change became significantly more sceptical after reading the editorials, but we observed no evidence of attitude polarisation—that is, the attitudes of these two groups did not diverge. The results are the first application of the well-established assimilation and polarisation paradigm to attitudes about climate change, with important implications for anticipating how uncertainty—in the form of conflicting information—may impact on public engagement with climate change.     

Politics eclipses climate extremes for climate change perceptions

Whether or not actual shifts in climate influence public perceptions of climate change remains an open question, one with important implications for societal response to climate change. We use the most comprehensive public opinion survey data on climate change available for the US to examine effects of annual and seasonal climate variation. Our results show that political orientation has the most important effect in shaping public perceptions about the timing and seriousness of climate change. Objective climatic conditions do not influence Americans’ perceptions of the timing of climate change and only have a negligible effect on perceptions about the seriousness of climate change. These results suggest that further changes in climatic conditions are unlikely to produce noticeable shifts in Americans’ climate change perceptions.     

Patterns of controversy and consensus in German,Canadian, and US online news on climate change

Individual action and support for policy to tackle climate change have been linked to perceptions of political and scientific controversy and consensus concerning the issue. Recent media effects research indicates that presentation of agreement or conflict between actors’ opinions influences how audiences respond to news about climate change and policy. While some national case studies have investigated portrayals of actors’ positions on important questions regarding climate change in the media, they are largely absent from comparative research. This study addresses this gap by analysing portrayals of actor-issue-positions and the emerging patterns of controversy and consensus in German, Canadian, and US coverage. Studying a sample of occurrences of climate change-related issues (N = 902) in-depth, the results show German media present political consensus about the need to limit emissions and societal controversy about the efficacy of specific mitigation measures. Presenting mainly consensus, Canadian media report more on climate change’s impact, leaving aside the issue of efficacy. In the US, media emphasise political controversy — about the need to limit emissions and occasionally about climate change’s impact on humans. The findings, consistent with other recent publications, can best be explained by journalists selectively indexing of seemingly relevant actor-issue-positions.     

Attribution matters: Revisiting the link between extreme weather experience and climate change mitigation responses

The literature suggests that extreme weather experiences have potential to increase climate change engagement by influencing the way people perceive the proximity and implications of climate change. Yet, limited attention has been directed at investigating how individual differences in the subjective interpretation of extreme weather events as indications of climate change moderate the link between extreme weather experiences and climate change attitudes. This article contends that subjective attribution of extreme weather events to climate change is a necessary condition for extreme weather experiences to be translated into climate change mitigation responses, and that subjective attribution of extreme weather to climate change is influenced by the psychological and social contexts in which individuals appraise their experiences with extreme weather. Using survey data gathered in the aftermath of severe flooding across the UK in winter 2013/2014, personal experience of this flooding event is shown to only directly predict perceived threat from climate change, and indirectly predict climate change mitigation responses, among individuals who subjectively attributed the floods to climate change. Additionally, subjective attribution of the floods to climate change is significantly predicted by pre-existing climate change belief, political affiliation and perceived normative cues. Attempts to harness extreme weather experiences as a route to engaging the public must be attentive to the heterogeneity of opinion on the attributability of extreme weather events to climate change.     

Constraints on community engagement with Great Barrier Reef climate change reduction and mitigation

Engaging stakeholders in Great Barrier Reef climate change reduction and mitigation strategies is central to efforts aimed at reducing human impacts on the reef and increasing its resilience to climate change. We developed a theoretical framework to investigate subjective and objective constraints on cognitive, affective, and behavioural engagement with the Great Barrier Reef climate change issue. A survey of 1623 Australian residents revealed high levels of cognitive and affective engagement with the Great Barrier Reef climate change issue, but that behavioural engagement was limited by objective constraints that intervene between individuals’ desire to become engaged (affective engagement) and their ability to take relevant actions. Individuals were constrained from increasing their engagement with the Great Barrier Reef climate change issue primarily by lack of knowledge about actions they can take, lack of time, and having other priorities. Individuals’ age, gender, education level, income, and place of residence influenced the probability that they would experience these and other specific constraints on engagement. We suggest that future Great Barrier Reef engagement strategies must endeavour to identify specific behaviour that individuals can undertake to help reduce the impact of climate change on the reef, and find ways to help people overcome the constraints they face on engagement in those activities. The theoretical framework we developed should be useful for investigating constraints on engagement with other environmental issues, but further empirical and conceptual work is necessary.     

Learning and climate change

Abstract

Learning—i.e. the acquisition of new information that leads to changes in our assessment of uncertainty—plays a prominent role in the international climate policy debate. For example, the view that we should postpone actions until we know more continues to be influential. The latest work on learning and climate change includes new theoretical models, better informed simulations of how learning affects the optimal timing of emissions reductions, analyses of how new information could affect the prospects for reaching and maintaining political agreements and for adapting to climate change, and explorations of how learning could lead us astray rather than closer to the truth. Despite the diversity of this new work, a clear consensus on a central point is that the prospect of learning does not support the postponement of emissions reductions today.     

Socioeconomic geography of climate change views in Europe

Climate change views have their socioeconomic foundations but also specific geographies. In merging these perspectives, this analysis uses ESS Round 8 data from 23 European countries to examine whether climate change scepticism and concern, pro-environmental personal norm and a willingness to engage in energy-saving behaviour exhibit, first, urban–rural and/or regional differences, and second, if these attitudes can be explained at individual level by socioeconomic position and wellbeing resources. We find that climate change scepticism and concern do exhibit urban–rural differences, where living in a country village is associated with greater climate scepticism and lower concern compared to living in a big city. Also, higher climate change concern and pro-environmental norms are associated with living in a region with constant population growth. These geographical differences are independent of individual-level socioeconomic attributes as well as one’s political orientation. Additionally, the results show that both climate change attitudes and reporting energy-saving behaviour are strongly stratified by level of education and reveal that those in lower income deciles feel less pro-environmental norm but nonetheless report greater engagement with energy-saving behaviour. In sum, the results highlight that climate change mitigation is not a uniform project either spatially or within certain socioeconomic strata. Hence, our results suggest that socioeconomic disadvantage (belonging to the lowest education and income levels) and spatial marginalisation (living in more rural surroundings and declining regions) should be better acknowledged when reworking climate change and environmental policies in the EU.     

Citizens, consumers and sustainability: (Re)Framing environmental practice in an age of climate change

Recent moves by national and local policy makers have sought to encourage individuals to engage in a wide range of pro-environmental practices to address both discrete environmental problems and major, global challenges such as climate change. The major framing device for these developments is the notion of ‘citizen–consumers’, which positions individual ecological responsibilities alongside consumer choice logics in a Neo-liberal socio-economic framework. In the environmental social sciences, there have been recent moves to interpret the citizen–consumer through adopting a social practices approach, which advances the notion that in understanding environmental commitments, a deeper appreciation of underlying norms, values, identity politics and consumption is required to uncover the complex processes that lead to environmental practices in specific contexts. This paper argues that whilst these approaches have considerable utility in tracing the normalisation of established and discrete environmental practices in particular contexts, the issue of climate change represents an independent and over-arching discursive conflict between new and embedded practices that challenges the ability of citizen–consumers to act as agents for change. Accordingly, the data presented in this paper suggest that climate change can be seen as an unsettling and dynamic issue that generates discursive conflict in its own right around fundamental issues of knowledge, responsibility, scale and place. The paper therefore argues that a new and more critical perspective is required within environmental social science to understand (conflicting) discourses of sustainable living between the ‘passive’ normalisation of conventional environmental practice and the ‘contested’ ambiguities of climate change.     

The influence of national temperature fluctuations on opinions about climate change in the U.S. since 1990

Public opinion in the United States about human-caused climate change has varied over the past 20 years, despite an increasing consensus about the issue in the expert community. Attitudes about climate change have been attributed to a number of factors including personal values, political ideology, the media environment and personal experience. Recent studies have found evidence that the temperature can influence one’s opinion about climate change and willingness to change behaviour and/or support climate policy. Although there is some evidence that individual cool or warm years have influenced large-scale opinion about climate change, the extent to which temperature can explain the past variability in public opinion and public discourse about climate change at the national level is not known. Here we isolate the relationship between opinion about climate change and temperature at the national scale, using data from opinion polls, a discourse analysis of opinion articles from five major daily newspapers, and a national air temperature database. The fraction of respondents to national polls who express “belief in” or “worry about” climate change is found to be significantly correlated to U.S. mean temperature anomalies over the previous 3–12 months. In addition, the fraction of editorial and opinion articles which “agree” with the expert consensus on climate change is also found to be significantly correlated to U.S. mean temperature anomalies at seasonal and annual scales. These results suggest that a fraction of the past variance in American views about climate change could potentially be explained by climate variability.     

Mediated climate change in Britain: Scepticism on the web and on television around Copenhagen

Copenhagen 2009 was a major moment in the development of climate change as an issue. But climate sceptics before and during this event, sought to influence the nature of debate, and for this reason, the way Copenhagen was covered in the mass media was particularly important. This paper outlines the contours of contrarian arguments and claims, and assesses their reflection in the coverage at Copenhagen. The focus is on television, and extends to the assessment of internet - both modes of mass communication underrepresented in the existing literature. The results suggest a higher profile for contrarians and scepticism than is perhaps healthy, and speak to the role of these mass media, now and in the future, particularly with regard to the issue of public comprehension of the issues involved.     

Tools for a new climate conversation: A mixed-methods study of language for public engagement across the political spectrum

Political orientation and ideology are amongst the most significant influences on climate change attitudes and responses. Specifically, those with right-of-centre political views are typically less concerned and more sceptical about climate change. A significant challenge remains to move beyond this ideological impasse and achieve a more open and constructive debate across the political spectrum. This paper reports on novel mixed-methods research in the UK to develop and test a series of ‘narratives’ to better engage citizens with centre-right political views. Qualitative work in Study 1 revealed two particularly promising narratives. The first focused on the idea that saving energy is predicated on the ‘conservative’ principle of avoiding waste; the second focused on the advantages of ‘Great British Energy’ (based on patriotic support for domestic low-carbon technologies). An online experiment in Study 2 with a representative UK sample compared these narratives with a more typically left-of-centre narrative focused on the concept of ‘climate justice’ with a representative sample of the UK public. Results indicate that the first two narratives elicited broad agreement and reduced scepticism amongst centre-right participants, while the ‘climate justice’ narrative (which reflects a common environmental message framing) polarised audiences along political lines. This research offers clear implications for how climate change communicators can move beyond preaching to the converted and initiate constructive dialogue about climate change with traditionally disengaged audiences.     

A rose by any other name ...?: What members of the general public prefer to call “climate change”

Unlike many other environmental problems, the terms used to describe the phenomenon of increasing atmospheric concentrations of anthropogenic greenhouse gases are many, with multiple and sometimes conflicting meanings. Whether there are meaningful distinctions in public perceptions of “global warming,” “climate change,” and “global climate change” has been a topic of research over the past decade. This study examines public preferences for these terms based on respondent characteristics, including climate change beliefs, political affiliation, and audience segment status derived from the “Global Warming’s Six Americas” classification. Certainty of belief in global warming, political affiliation and audience segment status were found to be the strongest predictors of preference, although “I have no preference” was the modal response. Global warming appears to be a more polarizing term than climate change, preferred most by people already concerned about the issue, and least by people who don’t believe climate change is occurring. Further research is needed to identify which of these two names promotes the engagement of people across the spectrum of climate change beliefs in constructive dialogue about the issue.     

The polarization of public concern about climate change in Norway

This article contributes to the existing literature by investigating the importance of value orientations for the Norwegian public's climate change concern, by analysing data from a national Gallup Poll from 2003 to 2011. Logistic regressions were conducted to investigate the importance of individualistic and egalitarian values for climate concern, and whether the groups of different value orientations have polarized in their climate concern over time. Respondents who hold less individualistic values and those holding egalitarian values are found more likely to be concerned about climate change than are those holding individualistic and less egalitarian values. Furthermore, the analyses find polarization in climate concern in the period for both value orientations. Increased focus on policy instruments in the political debate may be one explanation for values being increasingly salient. Future research should focus on studying ways to formulate policies given variations in values. One way would be to develop solutions that have co-benefits across groups of different value orientations. However, not all mitigation policies have immediate co-benefits for everyone. Research on how changes in the institutional setting may enhance the logic of social responsibility seems crucial.

Policy relevance

It is an important social science contribution to increase our understanding of public positions on climate change for developing effective responses to this vexing problem. This study identifies polarization over time between subgroups of different value orientations in their climate change concern. This may have implications for policies, as political solutions may be increasingly dependent on the composition of political leadership. Society and politicians should look for mitigation policies that have co-benefits across groups of different value orientations when possible. However, not all mitigation policies have immediate co-benefits for everyone. One option then is to change the institutional settings from enhancing the logic of individual benefits to enhancing the logic of social benefits for behaviour crucial for mitigating climate change. Finally, narratives about a low-emitting society that are attractive for all groups of value orientations should be emphasized.     

Considering attitudinal uncertainty in the climate change skepticism continuum

In this paper we present an empirically driven language to discuss climate change skepticism. We conceptualize skeptic/skepticism as an umbrella term that includes those who actively reject climate science and those who are uncertain about climate change. We propose four categories for better empirical analysis of climate skepticism: epistemic deniers, epistemic doubters (borrowing from Capstick and Pidgeon 2014), attribution deniers, and attribution doubters (borrowing from Rahmstorf 2004). Using a unique dataset of surveys (n = 1000) and interviews (n = 33) with residents of the U.S. Pacific Northwest who are skeptical about climate change, we compare those four groups across several predictors and demographic variables (age, race, gender, political ideology, religiosity, income, education, and level of trust in science) and outcome variables (environmental concern, policy support, and conspiracy ideation (adherence to the belief that climate change is a “hoax”). We demonstrate the importance of considering attitudinal uncertainty in the analysis of climate skepticism by providing evidence for the presence of a continuum of thought wherein epistemic deniers and attribution doubters make up the two ends of a continuum with more complicated distinctions between epistemic doubters and attribution deniers.     

Climate change or nuclear power—No thanks! A quantitative study of public perceptions and risk framing in Britain

The UK is witnessing a new line in political debate around new nuclear energy generation as one potential feature of future energy policy, specifically for contributing to climate change mitigation alongside energy security. Little is known about how ordinary citizens might be responding to this reframing. This paper reports the results from a major British survey (n=1491) undertaken in the autumn of 2005. The consistent message is that while higher proportions of the British public are prepared to accept nuclear power if they believe it contributes to climate change mitigation, this is a highly conditional view, with very few actively preferring this over renewable sources given the choice. People see both climate change and nuclear power as problematic in terms of risks and express only a ‘reluctant acceptance’ of nuclear power as a ‘solution’ to climate change. The combined data from this survey can also be interpreted as an indication of the complexity surrounding beliefs about energy futures and the difficulty of undertaking simplistic risk–risk tradeoffs within any single framing of the issues; such as nuclear energy versus climate change. The results also indicate that it would be unwise, in the UK as elsewhere, to simplistically assume that there exists any single or stable public ‘opinion’ on such complex matters. We conclude with a discussion of the role and implications of the survey evidence for the policy process.     

Climate change perceptions and their individual-level determinants: A cross-European analysis

There is now an extensive literature on the question of how individual-level factors affect climate change perceptions, showing that socio-political variables, notably values, worldviews and political orientation, are key factors alongside demographic variables. Yet little is known about cross-national differences in these effects, as most studies have been conducted in a single or small number of countries and cross-study comparisons are difficult due to different conceptualisations of key climate change dimensions. Using data from the European Social Survey Round 8 (n = 44,387), we examine how key socio-political and demographic factors are associated with climate change perception across 22 European countries and Israel. We show that human values and political orientation are important predictors of climate change beliefs and concern, as are the demographics of gender, age, and education. Certain associations with climate change perceptions, such as the ones for the self-transcendence versus self-enhancement value dimension, political orientation, and education, are more consistent across countries than for gender and age. However, even if the direction of the associations are to a large extent consistent, the sizes of the effects are not. We demonstrate that the sizes of the effects are generally smaller in Central and Eastern European countries, and that some demographic effects are larger in Northern European as compared to Western European countries. This suggests that findings from one country do not always generalize to other national contexts.     

“Natural cycles” in lay understandings of climate change

This article analyses lay understandings of climate change elicited through a longitudinal population-based survey of climate change, place and community among 1162 residents in the Hunter Valley, Southeast Australia. We explore how older residents in contrasting rural and coastal geographic areas perceive climate change information in terms of culturally relevant meanings and values, lived experiences and emotional responses to seasonal cycles, temperature fluctuations and altered landscapes. Thematic analysis of comments given by 467 interviewees to an open-ended question identified a significant subset for whom the concepts of “nature” and “science” express competing views about changing climatic conditions. For them, the idea of “natural cycles” is a significant cultural construct that links nature and humans through time in a way that structures stable and resilient understandings of environmental change, drawing on established cosmological frameworks for contemplating the future in relation to the past. In contrast to other studies that postulate scepticism and denial as individuals’ fear management strategies in the face of climate change threat, we found that the natural cycles view is founded on a reassuring deeper conviction about how nature works, and is linked to other pro-environmental values not commonly found in sceptical groups. It is a paradox of natural cycles thinking that it rejects the anthropocentrism that is at the heart of science-based environmentalism. By contrast, it places humans as deeply integrated with nature, rather than operating outside it and attempting with uncertain science to control something that is ultimately uncontrollable.