The Weather is Bad, Climate Change must be Real! – America

Maybe it was all that priming, but 69 percent of respondents in that March poll went on to say that they believed global warming was affecting the weather in the United States. And that, of course, was before the Colorado wildfires, and before the most recent wave of storms and heat in the Midwest and Northeast, which have brought renewed media attention to climate change. If you polled the country today, the number might well top 70 percent.

To the science-minded, it might be disconcerting that the weather drives Americans’ beliefs about climate change. After all, scientists’ models have been showing and predicting climate change for decades. And global warming’s relationship to any given weather trend is probabilistic, not causal, as David Roberts explained in a thoughtful Grist post recently.

On top of that, those who base their climate judgments on the weather rather than on science are missing out on all the data that link global warming to greenhouse gas emissions. That helps explain why, even as more people acknowledge global warming, fewer believe that humans are causing it. As Brian Merchant wrote in Slate a year ago, to turn climate skeptics into believers would probably require dismantling the denial industry and exposing more people to the actual evidence.”