title: Spatial heterogeneity of climate change as an experiential basis for skepticism.
abstract: We postulate that skepticism about climate change is partially caused by the spatial heterogeneity of climate change, which exposes experiential learners to climate heuristics that differ from the global average. This hypothesis is tested by formalizing an index that measures local changes in climate using station data and comparing this index with survey-based model estimates of county-level opinion about whether global warming is happening. Results indicate that more stations exhibit cooling and warming than predicted by random chance and that spatial variations in these changes can account for spatial variations in the percentage of the population that believes that "global warming is happening." This effect is diminished in areas that have experienced more record low temperatures than record highs since 2005. Together, these results suggest that skepticism about climate change is driven partially by personal experiences; an accurate heuristic for local changes in climate identifies obstacles to communicating ongoing changes in climate to the public and how these communications might be improved.
authors.affiliation: Department of Earth and Environment, Boston University, Boston, MA 02215; kaufmann@bu.edu.
authors.forename: Robert K
authors.initials: RK
authors.lastname: Kaufmann
authors.affiliation: Department of Geography, The George Washington University, Washington, DC 20052.
authors.forename: Michael L
authors.initials: ML
authors.lastname: Mann
authors.affiliation: Department of Earth and Environment, Boston University, Boston, MA 02215.
authors.forename: Sucharita
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Gopal
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Boston University, Boston 02215, MA.
authors.forename: Jackie A
authors.initials: JA
authors.lastname: Liederman
authors.affiliation: Environment and Society Department, Utah State University, Logan, UT 84322.
authors.forename: Peter D
authors.initials: PD
authors.lastname: Howe
authors.affiliation: Programme for Economic Modelling, INET at the Oxford Martin School, University of Oxford OX1 1NF, Oxford, United Kingdom.|Department of Economics, University of Oxford OX1 3UQ, Oxford, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Felix
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Pretis
authors.affiliation: Department of Earth and Environment, Boston University, Boston, MA 02215.
authors.forename: Xiaojing
authors.identifier: 0000-0002-2834-6105
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Tang
authors.affiliation: Department of Earth and Environment, Boston University, Boston, MA 02215.
authors.forename: Michelle
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Gilmore
mesh_terms: D001290:Attitude; D002980:Climate; D003080:Cold Temperature; D003142:Communication; D057232:Global Warming; D017752:Greenhouse Effect; D006358:Hot Temperature; D006801:Humans
keywords: climate change; climate skepticism; experiential learning; local climate; recency weighting