Explaining perceptions of climate change in the US

Abstract

A significant proportion of the US population does not believe that climate change is a serious problem and immediate action is necessary. We ask whether individuals’ experiences with long-run changes in their local climate can override the power of partisanship that appears to dominate this opinion process. We merge individual-level data on climate change perceptions and the main determinants previously identified by the literature with county-level data on an exogenous measure of local climate change. While we find that local climate change significantly affects perceptions and in the expected direction, partisanship and political ideology maintain the strongest effect. We then field a randomized online experiment to test whether partisanship also drives support for pro-climate policies and the willingness to make environmentally friendly individual choices.