Flood Realities, Perceptions and the Depth of Divisions on Climate

Abstract

Research has led to broad agreement among scientists that anthropogenic climate change is happening now and likely to worsen. In contrast to scientific agreement, US public views remain deeply divided, largely along ideological lines. Science communication has been neutralised in some arenas by intense counter-messaging, but as adverse climate impacts become manifest they might intervene more persuasively in local perceptions. We look for evidence of this occurring with regard to realities and perceptions of flooding in the northeastern US state of New Hampshire. Although precipitation and flood damage have increased, with ample news coverage, most residents do not see a trend. Nor do perceptions about past and future local flooding correlate with regional impacts or vulnerability. Instead, such perceptions follow ideological patterns resembling those of global climate change. That information about the physical world can be substantially filtered by ideology is a common finding from sociological environment/society research.

Keywords: New Hampshire; climate change; environmental concern; floods; global warming; ideology; interaction; public opinion; survey.

Figure 1.

Percentage accepting anthropogenic climate change from CERA or CAFOR surveys (10,422 interviews conducted 2010 to 2014) vs county per cent vote for Obama in 2012, across 25 US counties.

Figure 2.

Percentage accepting anthropogenic climate change from Granite State Poll surveys (13,677 interviews conducted 2010 to 2015) vs county per cent vote for Obama in 2012, across 10 New Hampshire counties.

Figure 3.

(A) Federal expenditures on flood-related presidentially declared disasters and emergency declarations in New Hampshire, in constant 2014 dollars; (B) Number of reports about New Hampshire flood policy/planning and flooding events in the Union Leader.

Figure 4.

(A) Daily discharge of the Lamprey River near Newmarket in southeast New Hampshire, showing top 1% and a 2005 estimate of the ‘100-year flood’ discharge; (B) Frequency of days with discharge in the top 1% for at least one of five.

Figure 5.

(A) Survey responses about floods in New Hampshire over the past decade compared with 20 or 30 years ago; (B) Observed frequency of extreme precipitation events by decade (from USHCN data); (C) Survey responses about floods over the next few decades.

Figure 6.

Percentage who think that (A) destructive floods in New Hampshire have increased over the past decade; (B) floods are likely to increase in the next few decades; or (C) climate change is happening now, caused mainly by human activities – by self-described ideology.

Figure 7.

Interaction of education and ideology affects the probability of a ‘floods likely to increase in the future’ response. Adjusted marginal plot calculated from model 2 in Table 2, with 95 per cent confidence bands.