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Climatic Change (2014) 122:695708
DOI 10.1007/s10584-013-1003-1
Stuart Bryce Capstick & Nicholas Frank Pidgeon
Received: 21 January 2013 /Accepted: 6 November 2013 /Published online: 8 January 2014 # The Author(s) 2013. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com
Abstract It has been argued that public doubts about climate change have been exacerbated by cold weather events seen as a form of disconfirming evidence for anticipated warming. Although a link between perceptions of climate and weather is well-established, such assumptions have not been empirically tested. Here we show, using nationally representative data, that directly following a period of severe cold weather in the UK, three times as many people saw these events as pointing towards the reality of climate change, than as disconfirming it. This we argue was a consequence of these cold winters being incorporated into a conceptualisation of extreme or unnatural weather resulting from climate change. We also show that the way in which people interpret cold weather is associated with levels of pre-existing scepticism about climate change, which is in turn related to more general worldviews. Drawing attention to extreme weather as a consequence of climate change can be a useful communication device, however this is problematic in the case of seasonal cold.
1 Introduction
Recent years have seen declines in public acceptance of, and concern about, climate change from previously high levels observed following the publication of the fourth IPCC assessment report (Smith and Leiserowitz 2012; Pidgeon 2012). Although some data now suggest a partial rebound (Borick and Rabe 2012; Leiserowitz et al. 2012), the prevailing downwards shift in public opinion was particularly striking in the late 2000s, a period coinciding with unusually cold winters in Europe and the United States. In the UK these included the coldest winter (2009/2010) for 30 years and the second coldest December (2010) for 350 years (Blunden et al. 2011).
Some commentators have suggested these phenomena were related: in essence, that experience of extreme cold weather was interpreted by people as a form of evidence disconfirming a supposed warming effect. The Daily Telegraph (January 6th, 2010) for example quotes the atmospheric scientist Steve Dorling noting that [i]ts no surprise that people look out of their window at the snow and find it hard to rationalise...