Information about the human causes of global warming influences causal attribution, concern, and policy support related to global warming

Abstract

Scientists know that human activities, primarily fossil fuel combustion, are causing Earth’s temperature to increase. Yet in 2021, only 60% of the US population understood that human activities are the primary cause of global warming. We experimentally test whether information about the human causes of global warming influences Americans’ beliefs and concerns about global warming and support for climate policies. We find that communicating information about the human-causes of global warming increases public understanding that global warming is human-caused. This information, both alone and with additional information about climate impacts and policy solutions, also increases public concern about global warming and support for climate policies, although the effects on climate concern and policy support are smaller. Importantly, the treatment effects are consistent across political party, with no backlash effects among Republicans. This suggests that when informed about climate change causes, impacts and solutions, most Americans can update their own climate change beliefs, risk perceptions, and policy support.

Keywords:

• Survey experiment
• climate change
• public opinion
• information deficit model
• metaphor
• communication

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 One sign of limited engagement is limited discussion of global warming among family and friends (Leiserowitz et al., 2021).

2 Like all metaphors, the blanket metaphor is not perfectly accurate. Most notably, a blanket insulates heat emanating from a person’s body, whereas the original heat source for global warming is the sun’s energy, which is absorbed and re-radiated by the Earth’s surface. The blanket metaphor is commonly used because it translates a complex scientific phenomena into familiar terms without jargon. A more complete explanation grounded in physics would be more technically accurate, however, and might avoid potential confusion about the mechanism driving global warming. For example, a short physics-based explanation provided at https://www.howglobalwarmingworks.org explains, “Earth transforms sunlight’s visible light energy into infrared light energy, which leaves Earth slowly because it is absorbed by greenhouse gases. When people produce greenhouse gases, energy leaves Earth even more slowly––raising Earth’s temperature.” Future research could directly compare the effects of these more detailed explanations with a simplifying metaphor such as the one we use.

3 The second half of this lead sentence differed across our four treatments, to emphasize whether the two paragraphs discussed causes, impacts, solutions, or impacts and solutions.

4 This method of estimating latent scores is similar to Principal Components Analysis, with two key distinguishing features. First, the method preserves the ordinal structure of the input data rather than requiring standardization of the Likert-scale inputs as with conventional Principal Components Analysis. Second, the method allows estimation of the score for respondents who choose not to answer one or more of the dependent variable questions, whereas Principal Components Analysis requires complete input data for each respondent.

5 As shown in the analyses to follow (Figure 2 and Table 3), we also assessed the effect of each treatment independently. All effects were similar in magnitude and direction, and we found no statistically significant differences in the effect sizes across the treatments.

Additional information

Funding

The authors acknowledge the funding received from the Energy Foundation, Heising-Simons Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, and the 11th Hour Project.