Is It Climate Change? Americans Mostly Say Yes

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By Grace van Deelen, Eos/AGU. 

Excerpt: Attribution science aims to determine the extent to which climate change causes natural hazards and extreme weather such as hurricanes, wildfires, floods, and heat waves. But how comfortable is the public in making these connections? Pretty comfortable, as it turns out. A new study published in Climatic Change shows that 83% of Americans have some confidence in attributing at least one type of extreme weather to climate change. However, the public’s views varied among hazards and didn’t always line up with scientists’ confidence. The results point out some important considerations for climate scientists looking to communicate their work to the public. ...The public’s confidence in attributing events aligned with climate scientists’ understanding of how extreme weather and climate change are linked about 40% of the time, according to the researchers. The scientists’ views came from a 2016 report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. The public was least aligned with scientists when it came to wildfires and, on average, overattributed these events to climate change. That makes sense to Zanocco—though the public may see visceral images of Earth on fire and make a strong link to climate change, scientists tend to understand that the reasons for wildfires are highly complex, and climate change isn’t always the primary cause, he said.... 

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