How Do You Know If You’ve Experienced Global Warming?
Excerpt: People in every corner of the United States are increasingly seeing climate change affect their daily lives: water shortages and lost crops from extended drought, record-breaking heat waves in cities, hazy air from wildfire smoke half a country away, and hurricane-related flooding in basement apartments, to name just a few. ...A recent study in Global Environmental Change has found that regardless of political and sociodemographic factors, experiencing an anomalously high number of hot, dry days is most likely to make U.S. residents believe they’ve experienced global warming. “Climate change expresses itself very differently in different places—wildfires and drought in the West, hurricanes and flooding in the East, all of the above in Texas!” said Jennifer Marlon, a climate scientist at the Yale School of the Environment in New Haven, Conn., and lead author of the study. “This study points to the importance of helping people interpret local impacts from extreme weather and connecting those impacts to their root cause: fossil fuel burning and the carbon pollution it produces.” ...Only after experiencing an unusually high number of hot, dry days were respondents more likely than the national average of 30% to answer that they had personally experienced global warming. Each year of the survey, the shift in perception was greatest in regions that were most affected by heat waves and long-term drought, including California, Texas, and cities across the country.…