About half of Americans dont think climate change will affect them heres why

More than half of Americans seem to think that climate change won’t affect them personally, a new poll shows. Only 45 percent think that global warming will pose a serious threat in their lifetime, and just 43 percent say they worry a great deal about climate change. But climate change is already affecting us — so why don’t people realize that? The reason has to do with a mixture of politics and psychology.

The poll, conducted by Gallup, shows that many Americans “perceive climate change as a distant problem,” says Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. A lot of people think that we won’t bear the brunt of climate change until 2050 or 2100, and that other parts of the world will be affected, not the US, not their state, their city, or their community. “As a result, it becomes psychologically distant. It’s just one of thousands other issues that are out there.” If I have to worry about paying my hospital bills, I’m less concerned about melting sea ice in the Arctic.

“it’s just one of thousands other issues that are out there.”

But temperatures are going up everywhere, not just in the Arctic; cities are especially hard-hit and heat waves are becoming more frequent. Extreme weather events — like wildfires and hurricanes — are also becoming more extreme. These changes are consistent with a warming world, scientists say. That sort of makes sense: though the Gallup poll found that while only 64 percent of Americans think that global warming is caused by human activities, 97 percent of climate scientists believe that.

Though we’re starting to feel the effects of climate change, those effects are not dramatic enough on a day-to-day basis to convince the majority of Americans that climate change should be taken seriously, says Magali Delmas, a professor at the Institute of Environment and Sustainability at UCLA. Human beings aren’t great at dealing with situations that are high-risk but don’t happen that often. Think of earthquake insurance, for instance. Though there’s a 99 percent chance that there’s going to be a magnitude 6.7 earthquake in the next 30 years in California, the probability that it’s going to happen in the next year and is going to affect me is much lower. As a result, only 13 percent of people in California have purchased insurance from the California Earthquake Authority, Delmas says.

Now apply that kind of thinking to climate change, which is often framed as a catastrophic event. Unfortunately, scare tactics don’t work to change people’s beliefs and behavior. For people who do accept that climate change is real, it might feel like an insurmountable problem that’s just too big for any individual to tackle. People who don’t believe that human-caused climate change is altering the world may feel like the catastrophe scenarios are just hype. If the problem was that bad, wouldn’t we be putting effort into solving it? “If there’s nothing you can do about it, you disconnect, you disengage,” Delmas says.

But attitudes on climate change have shifted recently — mostly due to politics, Leiserowitz says. In 2009, after the election of Barack Obama, there was a clear shift in the public’s perception of climate change. The percent of Americans who believed climate change is real dropped precipitously from 71 percent in 2008 to 57 percent in 2009. The culprit? Politics, according to a study Leiserowitz published in Environmental Politics last year. He found that the shift in how Americans perceived climate change overlapped with the rise of the tea party, which is known for its denial of global warming. Americans who strongly identify as Republicans or Democrats and pay attention to politics, “tend to listen to what their leaders say,” Leiserowitz says.

Democrats and Republicans are becoming more polarized on issues about the climate

In fact, the election of Donald Trump — who’s called climate change a “hoax” and said on Twitter that climate change isn’t real because it’s cold out — also altered attitudes further. Right after the 2016 presidential election, belief that global warming is happening dropped 2 percentage points among all Republican registered voters, compared to spring 2016, Leiserowitz says. And the polarization has continued, something Gallup’s survey shows. Democrats and Republicans are becoming more polarized on climate: 69 percent of Republicans said they think “the seriousness of global warming is generally exaggerated,” an increase from 66 percent last year. In comparison, 4 percent of Democrats think that, down from 10 percent in 2017. And the perception of climate change varies widely along party lines: only 18 percent of Republicans think global warming will pose a serious threat in their lifetime, compared to 67 percent of Democrats. And 33 percent of Republicans worry a great deal or fair amount about global warming, versus 91 percent of Democrats.

So, what can be done to make even more people care about climate change? To motivate people to take action, it’s important to connect climate change to something tangible, like air pollution and health problems. That has worked in China, Delmas says, where the public opinion has shifted in favor of clean energy after experiencing the effects of air pollution due to burning coal. Both Leiserowitz and Delmas agree that people need to be provided with solutions, like installing solar panels on their rooftops or buying an electric car. “People need a sense of hope,” says Leiserowitz.

Leiserowitz is hopeful that the public perception of climate change will soon change. More Americans think that global warming will pose a serious threat in their lifetime than at any other time since 1997, according to Gallup. People are already beginning to take notice of the more extreme weather events, like hurricanes and wildfires, wreaking havoc across the country. And some of the solutions to climate change — like renewable energy — are becoming cheaper and more accessible. It doesn’t matter that Trump is promising to bring back coal, Leiserowitz says.

The market may help where beliefs do not — if renewable energy remains cheap, even skeptics are likely to use it.

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