Changing climate, changing minds? The effects of natural disasters on public perceptions of climate change

Abstract

The frequency and intensity of natural disasters such as hurricanes, wildfires, and floods are predicted to change as greenhouse gas concentrations increase. These disasters may represent sources of information for individuals as they update their beliefs related to climate change. Using a dataset that includes climate beliefs of respondents, we examine the effect of natural disasters on climate change beliefs and find that hurricanes significantly increase the probability that survey respondents from a given county believe that climate change is occurring and that it is human caused. We find that past experience with certain types of natural disasters (e.g., hurricanes) impacts beliefs regarding whether climate change is occurring and if it is human caused. The research contributes to the literature evaluating climate change attitudes by using spatially disaggregate information on climate change beliefs and exposure to a set of natural disasters over time. Characterizing beliefs and attitudes toward climate change and related policies is important since these beliefs are a determinant of individual adaptation and support for policies related to reducing carbon emissions.

Keywords: Climate change; Natural disasters; Public beliefs.

Fig. 1

Distribution of county-level changes between 2014 and 2019 in the proportion of individuals answering affirmatively to two separate survey questions related to climate change beliefs. The dashed line indicates the mean change

Fig. 2

The effect of hurricanes (Panel A), fire, (Panel B), and floods (Panel C) on the proportion of a county that believes climate change is happening as a function of historic fire frequency. Intervals around the point estimate represent a 90% confidence interval