Abstract
Climate change is expected to have heterogeneous effects on agriculture across the USA, where temperature and precipitation regimes are already changing. While the overall effect of climate change on agriculture is uncertain, farmers’ perceptions of current and future climate and weather conditions will be a key factor in how they adapt. This paper analyzes data from paired surveys (N = 817) and natural variation from baseline weather across the inland Pacific Northwest (iPNW), to determine if long-term, gradual changes in precipitation, and temperature distributions affect farmers’ weather perceptions and intentions to adapt. We note that some areas in the iPNW have experienced significant changes in weather, while others have remained relatively constant. However, we find no relationship between changes in temperature and precipitation distributions and individuals’ perceptions and intentions to adapt. Our findings provide evidence that gradual, long-term changes in weather are temporally incongruous with human perception, which can impede support for climate action policy and adaptation strategies.
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Notes
Harmful growing degree days are periods where maximum temperatures exceed a crop’s ability to transpire (around 30 °C), damaging the plant and reducing yields for the farmer (Schlenker and Roberts 2009).
Studies suggest that belief in anthropogenic climate change has implications for an individual’s subsequent support of mitigation and adaption actions (Arbuckle et al. 2013b; Hyland et al. 2015; Chatrchyan et al. 2017), although climate change attitudes provide weak evidence in support of actually implemented climate-related changes in agricultural production (Schattman et al. 2018a).
Results from survey 1 were not weighted since the calculated base weights were very close to one (ranging between 0.957 and 1.09). This confirmed that NASS was successful in identifying a representative sample.
Other analysis from the REACCH (Roesch-McNally 2018) project uses the entire sample, since it was not necessary to geolocate farms in much of this work. Moreover, we have statistically compared results from farms with and without locations and found no significant difference in their responses to the relevant survey questions (p = .42).
Using kurtosis as a metric may also be relevant given the importance of tails in weather distributions, but statistical methods for these moments are less developed.
Note that the results using the average daily temperature (used by Egan and Mullin 2012) are nearly identical to those using maximum temperature.
Year is a countable number from 0 (1981) to 35 (2015).
This is a combined model but provides equivalent point estimates as 12 individual models for each month.
This transformation was necessary to fulfill the normality assumption.
Four permutations of these variables are presented in the “Results” section, but results were qualitatively similar in coefficient sign and significance across most specifications.
A formal (Ramsey) test was used to evaluate omitted variables and did not find evidence of omitted variables.
Psychological distance is the cognitive separation between the self and other entities (persons, places, times, etc.) Construal level theory outlines four key dimensions of such psychological distance: geographical distance; temporal distance; distance between the perceiver and a social target; and uncertainty (Spence et al. 2011). Climate change is distant on all of these dimensions.
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Maas, A., Wardropper, C., Roesch-McNally, G. et al. A (mis)alignment of farmer experience and perceptions of climate change in the U.S. inland Pacific Northwest. Climatic Change 162, 1011–1029 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-020-02713-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-020-02713-6