The Initial Effects of Climate Change on Global Awareness and Threat Assessments

• In Event: Attitudes About Climate Upheaval and the Development-Conservation Tradeoff

Abstract

Climate change is having ever greater effects across the globe. These effects raise questions of how aware people are of these effects, and to what degree they perceive them as threats. However, the public opinion literature concerning the effects of climate change is severely limited in both its generalizability and theoretical insights. While climate change has a global scope, almost all of the studies of how it affects public opinion are limited to one nation, several nations, or nations confined to a single global region. There are only three studies that can claim to be generalizable to the entire world because they analyze data from the Gallup World Poll – a survey composed of annual waves of data starting in 2005-06. While Gallup dropped climate change questions after the 2010 wave, the existing data can be generalized to 98% of the world’s population. Unfortunately, the three studies that have analyzed these data used drastically different methodologies and also committed a serious methodological error. As a result, they reach dramatically different conclusions. The Gallup World Poll only measured climate change threat among those who indicated awareness of it, creating a censored sampling problem when analyzing responses to the threat questions. Considering national vulnerability to climate change in the form of sea level rise, and estimating a Heckman model to account for the censored sampling problem, I find that that peoples living in more vulnerable nations are both more aware of climate change, and perceive it as a greater threat.

Author

• Gregory A. Petrow, University of Nebraska, Omaha