The effect of different extreme weather events on attitudes toward climate change

RESEARCH ARTICLE The effect of different extreme weather events on attitudes toward climate change Giancarlo ViscontiID1☯*, Kayla Young2☯ 1 Department of Political Science, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania, United States of America, 2 Department of Political Science, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, United States of America ☯ These authors contributed equally to this work. * gvisconti@psu.edu Abstract Can exposure to extreme weather change political opinion and preferences about climate change? There is a growing literature on both the effects of extreme weather events and the factors explaining attitudes toward global warming, though there remains no clear consen- sus about whether being exposed to extreme weather influences public opinion about cli- mate change. We contribute to this literature by studying the impact of a variety of extreme weather events associated with climate variability, including severe storms, floods, fires, and hurricanes, on attitudes toward climate change. Specifically, we use a three-wave panel survey and a dynamic difference-in-differences design to analyze public opinion data at the individual level in the US. We find that exposure to only one extreme weather type—fires— has a small but significant effect on acknowledging the existence of climate change and sup- porting the need for action. However, that impact quickly vanishes, and other types of extreme weather do not appear to have any effect on opinion. Introduction

There is substantial evidence that the global climate is changing and will continue to transform well into the future [1]. Among the most consequential effects of unmitigated climate change is climate variability, which can increase the risks of disasters with potentially devastating impacts [2, 3]. Disasters in the form of extreme weather—including severe storms, floods, fires, and hurricanes—cause major damage across the United States each year. The 2010s were “an unprecedented decade of billion-dollar disasters,” with homes and thousands of acres of land engulfed by fires in the West and extreme flooding events inundating towns along the Eastern seaboard [4]. Extreme weather events like these are expected to become even more severe and frequent as climate change progresses in the coming decades. Understanding whether exposure to such disasters changes public opinion and policy preferences is a crucial task, given evidence that mass attitudes can influence policymakers and play a role in determining which policies are ultimately adopted [5, 6]. Exploring factors that influence public opinion about climate change could inform researchers and practitioners focused on policy making in this area and, as a PLOS ONE PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0300967 May 15, 2024 1 / 10 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 OPEN ACCESS Citation: Visconti G, Young K (2024) The effect of different extreme weather events on attitudes toward climate change. PLoS ONE 19(5): e0300967. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal. pone.0300967

Editor: Kristina Weis Kintziger, University of Nebraska Medical Center College of Public Health, UNITED STATES Received: August 28, 2023 Accepted: March 7, 2024 Published: May 15, 2024 Peer Review History: PLOS recognizes the benefits of transparency in the peer review process; therefore, we enable the publication of all of the content of peer review and author responses alongside final, published articles. The editorial history of this article is available here: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0300967 Copyright: © 2024 Visconti, Young. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability Statement: Replication data can be found here: https://dataverse.harvard.edu/ dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/ JIDPDJ.