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Extreme weather and climate opinion: evidence from Australia

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Abstract

Extreme weather patterns can be linked to the effects of anthropogenic climate change with increasing confidence. Evidence from the USA suggests a weak relationship between individuals’ experiences of many types of weather events and concern about climate change. Using data from Australia, we investigate the effects of experiences of increases in mean temperatures and drought on a range of measures related to individuals’ beliefs in, and concerns about, climate change. Our results show no association between recent experiences of elevated temperature relative to long-term average and views about climate change, though some association between longer-term temperature experiences. We find some evidence that experiencing less rainfall relative to the historical average is related to stronger sentiment that climate change is happening and higher levels of concern. The results are consistent with previous research showing experiences of extreme weather events do not have a large effect on beliefs in, or concerns about, climate change.

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Data availability

Full dataset will be made available via internet for publicly accessible download upon publication.

Code availability

Code, including all .do files, will be made available via internet for publicly accessible download upon publication.

Notes

  1. The World Values Survey 2010–2014, for example, finds 12.8% of respondents agree or strongly agree with the statement that “Whenever science and religion conflict, religion is always right,” compared to 38.9% in the USA.

  2. The survey was fielded over the following dates: 2010: 14 July to 19 August; 2011: 19 July to 18 August; 2012: 23 July to 15 August; 2013: 26 July to 28 August; 2014: 22 August to 22 September.

  3. See the Appendix for question details.

  4. See the Appendix for descriptive statistics.

  5. We report the full results below, but also conducted our analysis after excluding respondents in the Northern Territory, Queensland, and Western Australia, to examine whether individuals were less likely to associate temperature with climate change in the north of the country due to less temperature variability given proximity to the equator. The results, provided in the Appendix, are not sensitive to the inclusion or exclusion of these respondents.

  6. In addition, we constructed alternative baselines—specifically for 1980–1990 and 1980–2000—in order to reflect the possibility individuals may use different periods to compare recent temperatures against. Doing so did not substantively affect the results.

  7. The BOM defines drought as “a prolonged, abnormally dry period when the amount of available water is insufficient to meet our normal use.”

  8. Only monthly data was available for 2009, and we relied on partly monthly data when creating the 12 prior month average rainfall for the 2010 survey only.

  9. Because of a high degree of missingness (about 17% of cases), household income is approximated using multiple imputation.

  10. We do not include postcode fixed effects in our baseline models because of the small number of survey respondents in many postcodes.

  11. Additional sensitivity analyses are shown in the Appendix.

  12. In the multiple streams heuristic, windows are identified as an important factor enabling policy change to occur. See Kingdon and Thurber (1984).

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Acknowledgments

The authors thank the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, Justine Lacey, Zoe Leviston, and Iain Walker, for help in obtaining the weather and public opinion data, and related files.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, Australia

    Llewelyn Hughes

  2. O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA

    David M. Konisky

  3. Fenner School of Environment and Society, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, Australia

    Sandra Potter

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  1. Llewelyn Hughes
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  2. David M. Konisky
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  3. Sandra Potter
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Correspondence to Llewelyn Hughes.

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Hughes, L., Konisky, D.M. & Potter, S. Extreme weather and climate opinion: evidence from Australia. Climatic Change 163, 723–743 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-020-02900-5

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