Americans Connecting 2012's Extreme Weather to Climate Change

Yesterday The New York Times covered a new poll showing that an increasing number of Americans are linking the extreme weather events of the past few years—including the extremely warm March 2012, droughts, and hurricanes—to climate change. We asked Gavin Schmidt, a climate researcher at NASA's Goddard Institute and a member of PM's Editorial Board of Advisers, why he thinks this shift is happening, and if it means that policy changes could be on the horizon.
Indiana National Guard photo by Sgt. John Crosby

Whats your first reaction to these polling numbers?

I am not really surprised. Most people dont have a very sophisticated grasp of what climate change is, which is completely understandable. But people do have a visceral connection to weather; they talk about it, understand it, and theyre very fond of extremes in weather (in a conversational way.)

Whats it like to see these recent extreme events as a climate scientist? You look at the long term, but its these short- and medium-term events that seem to be swaying the public.

The psychology is that people know climate change is out there, and theyre trying to make it real to them. So you have a situation where theres all this talk about climate change, and then seemingly weird things happen like a huge heat wave or a big snow dump, and I think people just naturally associate these things. They want to be able to see something that they can point to and say, "Ah, thats what these people are talking about." We experience weather all the time. Its harder to have a good grasp of what climate is.

Do you agree with the researchers "close to home" ideathat is, these extreme events are making climate change and its effects more real for Americans, who previously viewed it as something off in the future or something for other countries to worry about?

Yes, this is a very normal psychological thing that we do we see things and then we associate them. So when theres a weird heat wave, like we had here in March, people will naturally gravitate toward thinking thats what climate change looks like. Its not that anybodys telling them that, but these things just become associated.

People can tell us general things, but we always look for specific things to make them more concrete. People are not being told the wrong thing; theyre just trying to make connections between the general and the specific.

The last few years have certainly felt strange, in an anecdotal sense. But is it possible to quantify how strange its actually been to have all these things togetherwarmest March ever, so many early tornadoes, droughts, etc.?

We often talk about extreme weather events like theyre all one thingthat theyre all increasing or decreasing. But the physics of why you get a tornado or a drought or a hurricane are completely different, and the idea that they all are touched by climate change equally is very wrong.

Weve done more work in the last 10 years on how climate change gets expressed in weather extremesas seen in the number of heat waves that are clearly increasing in number and intensity all over the worldand we expect this as we shift the mean toward warmer conditions. But when people talk about ice storms or a single hurricanethere the connection to climate change is much more tenuous. A lot of times the science hasnt been done on any specific extreme, and because theyre all unique, we need to have more serious data.

Do you think the publics misunderstanding of weather versus climate is a good or bad thing?

Obviously as a scientist, you want the public to know as much as you do, but I think realistically thats impossible. So . . . its not, "Oh my God, people are confused." Its more about, "Does this provide an opening? Does this provide a way to talk about the science and have people get a better understanding of whats going on?"

And I think the answer is yes. These poll results provide an opportunity to talk about how climate science is related to weather extremes and where were going and where the difficulty isthis notion of science as a process. There are good things here, because whether or not people are convinced or agree or disagree on climate change, it opens up a space for communication.

Theres an interesting note in the Times story that public acceptance of climate change hit a high point just before the recession, then waned, but now is on the rise again. How big of a factor do you think the economy is in the publics acceptance of climate change and particularly in moving climate policy forward?

The question presumes that climate policy is predicated on the idea that individual people have to make individual sacrifices for climate change, which is not the case at all. The best climate policy is one that nobody notices. If we have to rely on everybody to think about every action they make, it will never happen, so any climate policy has to address the problem without having people think about it.

Do you think more weird weather events in the U.S. will continue to increase public acceptance of human-induced climate change?

Probably, yes. If you look at some of the previous polling, the other big spike when people felt climate change was happening was in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. And it wasnt because scientists were telling them that Katrina was caused by climate changeit was just an obvious demonstration that we are vulnerable to weather events and therefore to climate change.

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