538: "Americans Were A Lot Less Worried About Climate Before Trump Took Office"

[hatrack]

As the science editor for The Atlantic, Ross Andersen struggled for years to find stories about climate change that readers would pay attention to. “Maximally apocalyptic headline and framing was the only way to get people in, and even those didn’t perform in huge ways,” he told me. But about eight months ago, that changed. The stories stayed basically the same. The readers, however, were suddenly paying a lot more attention.

FiveThirtyEight has seen its own uptick in traffic on climate change stories in the last six months, and science editors at BuzzFeed and Slate told me they’d noticed a similar trend. They’d had an easier time getting reader attention on climate change coverage before than Andersen had, but, over the last two years, without much else changing, their readers became more engaged with this topic, too. (All three sites declined to share detailed traffic numbers.)

And these examples from the media illustrate a bigger fact: Americans are just more interested in climate change, in general, than they used to be. Polls suggest that in the past two years, the American public started to believe more in climate change — and worry more about its impacts. So what gives? Big natural disasters probably have something to do with it, but both the journalists and the sociologists I spoke to think there’s another factor at play. As Slate’s science editor, Susan Matthews, put it: The urgency of climate change was one thing before President Trump’s election and something else entirely after.



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“As we got into it, we started to figure out that age cohorts don’t matter,” Johnson told me. Instead, the stats said that shifts in support for environmental spending — whether people believed it should go up or down — were more strongly correlated with things like politics and economics. Last month, Johnson published research that tracked American support for environmental spending over time. Since 1973, public support for increased environmental spending has tended to grow during Republican administrations and decline during Democratic ones. Which means Americans are more likely to want the government to take more environmental action when the person in the White House is less likely to have environmentalism as a core focus of his policy.

Ed. - Emphasis added - Gee, I wonder why . . . .

EDIT

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/americans-were-a-lot-less-worried-about-climate-change-before-trump-took-office/

[2naSalit]

1. This was a topic in

a few of my classes back in college. There is also a regularly predictable a spike in membership in conservation oriented NGOs during Republican administrations.