Among those concerned about the climate, it’s become something of a self-evident truth that as people suffer more severe and more frequent extreme weather and grapple with global warming’s impact on their daily lives, they’ll come to understand the problem at a visceral level. As a result, they’ll be eager for action. In other words, many climate activists believe that even if advocates and academics can’t sway the hardened opinions of the dismissive, extreme weather can wake anyone up.
The data disagrees.
Over the last seven years, as the effects of climate change have begun to envelop the world in smoke and storm, natural disasters have in fact leapt front of mind for voters when they contemplate the most important reasons to take climate action. Those concerns, however, aren’t shared evenly across the political spectrum.
Preventing extreme weather ranked among the top three reasons to address the crisis among 37 percent of voters surveyed this year, according to an analysis by the Yal... Read more
