Issue: Climate Impacts

This post includes climate and environment headlines, data points, and key takeaways from recent public polls – including a major new international climate survey by the United Nations, new research on Americans’ beliefs about climate change and extreme weather, and new battleground polling about climate change and clean energy in the presidential race.

Research finds that Americans are more confident blaming climate change for extreme heat and wildfires than for other types of extreme weather such as flooding, tornadoes, and hurricanes. The recent study found that politics and personal experience played significant roles in people’s responses: Self-identified Republicans were less likely than Democrats to attribute extreme weather events to climate change, though Republicans who had personally experienced negative impacts from extreme weather events were more likely to link them to climate change than those who hadn’t. Looking at extreme weather events across the board, 83% of survey respondents said there is some link between these events and anthropogenic, or human-caused, climate change. About 17% thought climate change had nothing to do with extreme weather. More than 47% of people were “very” or “extremely confident” in linking increased wildfires to climate change, and roughly 42% of people were very or extremely confident linking extreme heat to climate change.

This post includes climate and environment headlines, data points, and key takeaways from recent public polls – including new national polling on Americans’ climate attitudes, climate change and energy policy as factors in the presidential race, and extreme weather + new statewide polling in Georgia and North Carolina.

Using the term “unnatural disasters” may be the best way to message extreme weather and climate impacts. The increase in extreme weather is making millions of Americans unsafe and jeopardizing the people and places that we hold dear. While the solutions are clear, the communication is more complicated than we often think. Using “unnatural disasters” as a concept turns the notion of “natural disasters” on its head and opens the door to conversations about the true cause: fossil fuels. A platform grounded in the notion of “unnatural disasters” boosted support for action on climate change by 10 percentage points overall (including 12 p.p. with Republicans, 8 p.p. with Democrats, and 7 p.p. with Independents). Through conversations with thousands of Americans and months of rigorous testing, Potential Energy found a messaging that simultaneously builds awareness for the problem and generates enthusiasm for the solutions. The phrase “unnatural disasters” was twice as effective at shifting the focus to fossil fuels than simply calling it “extreme weather.”