Opinions about climate may be as fickle as the winds.
A simple shift in temperature and Columbia University social scientists found that opinions about future climate trends changed accordingly. In surveys of 1,200 people in the U.S. and Australia, many who thought the day was unusually warm were more likely to be concerned about global warming than they were on days they thought were unusually cold.
"I'm not sure I'd say that people are manipulated by the weather," lead author Ye Li said in a press release by Columbia. "But for some percentage of people, it's certainly pushing them around."
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Published in the journal Psychological Science, the analysis is part of a broader effort by social scientists to understand how people make decisions about environmental issues. The work may help explain the discrepancy between wavering doubts among the public and a large consensus of climate specialists who say changes are underway and human industrial emissions are a major factor.
While most climate specialists see the issue in terms of objective data and chemical and dynamical processes in the atmosphere, oceans, and other elements of the long-term climate system, public perceptions of the issue are often politicized and influenced by peer groups.
The researchers accounted for all of the predictable biases -- Democrats more likely than Republicans to believe in global warming, young people and women more likely than older people and men. With all these factors accounted for, "the researchers found that perceived temperatures still had nearly two-thirds the power as political belief, and six times the power as gender, to push someone one way or the other," said the press release.
This trick of the mind is known to psychologists as "attribute substitution," a process, according to Li, "in which an easily accessible judgment (the current day's local temperature) is used in place of a more complex and less accessible one (global temperature trends)."
IMAGE: Waterfront dining at Circular Quay with views over Sydney harbor, in New South Wales, Australia. Credit: Andrew Watson/JAI/Corbis.
Tags: Climate Change, Global Warming, Meteorology, Weather
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