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ABSTRACT
In 2017, the United States experienced a series of natural hazards (hurricanes, wildfires, and blizzards) that resulted in significant loss of life and property. Emphasizing the role of climate change in these events might offer an important tool for engagement, particularly with skeptical audiences. However, in a survey experiment (N = 1504) involving three different natural hazards – hurricanes, wildfires, and blizzards – we find that emphasizing the role of climate change in these hazards produced unintended effects for climate change skeptics. In particular, skeptics experienced resistance to the news article, which associated with reduced perceived hazard severity. These backfiring effects likely serve as a defensive mechanism used by skeptics to maintain their prior views of climate change, illustrating the challenges faced in communicating climate change to skeptical audiences. These findings offer additional insight for those attempting to communicate climate-related risk information to skeptical audiences.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 We collapsed our hazard types together and examined condition (emphasizing the role of climate change versus not emphasizing the role of climate change) as our independent variable. In all analyses, we controlled for hazard type along with age, sex, race, and previous experience with assigned hazard. Additionally, we found that hazard type did not significantly interact with any of our findings, justifying collapsing them together and focusing on our main variable of interest: emphasizing the role of climate change.