Who exactly in our nation doesn’t believe that climate change is real? And who is most concerned about the climate crisis? The Yale Program on Climate Change Communication conducts public opinion and messaging research using surveys, experiments, qualitative methods, statistical models, and maps among other methods. The program also airs 90-second solutions-oriented segments five days a week on more than 700 radio stations nationwide.
The Yale Program on Climate has worked for years to identify Americans’ opinions about climate change and has identified “Six Americas” from those who are alarmed to those who are dismissive, with four other points of view in between.
In May, the program released a new online tool that enables anyone to review survey data at the state, congressional district and county level to find what their neighbors and others around the country are thinking about climate change. Between The Lines’ Melinda Tuhus spoke with Eric Fine, project manager at the Yale Program on Climate, who talks about the work his organization is doing and how the public can use their tools.
ERIC FINE: For awhile, we were just giving national stats, saying that, for example, 72 percent of people in the U.S. understand that climate change is happening. And a lot of folks would ask us, “Well, what about over here in Wisconsin? Or what about my city? I think things are different over here.”
So, we created a model to downscale and tell you how people answered these questions – a few dozen of them – at the state scale, at the congressional district scale and at the county scale, as well – that’s called the Yale Climate Opinion Maps. And you can go online and play with them and see all these different opinions, how they vary from place to place. But then we wanted a better way for people to be able to summarize for a given area what people think about climate change, and that’s why we invented the Yale Climate Opinion fact sheet tool. You can go on the tool and in about 30-60 seconds you can check which questions you want to appear on your tool and for which area of the country you’d like to create a fact sheet, and you can choose whether you want it in Spanish or English, and then click a button and it will generate a fact sheet for you.
We create these tools and sometimes we have ideas about how they might be used, but then we see all kinds of creative ideas. The Citizens Climate Lobby, for example, they sit down with members of Congress to talk about climate change. And they say, “Hey, member of Congress, do you want to know what your constituents think about climate change?” And they show them these fact sheets. Before they see these fact sheets, we had a colleague actually that went and interviewed a bunch of senior staffers from members of Congress to ask them if they knew what climate opinions were among their constituents, and their guesses were far, far off.
MELINDA TUHUS: In what way were they far off?
ERIC FINE: They underestimated the level of concern and how people were prioritizing climate change, and the Republican staffers underestimated the concern of their constituents by much more than the Democratic staffers, but the Democratic staffers were underestimating concern about climate change as well.
And if you are advising your member of Congress on a faulty estimate of where your constituents are, then you are going to be advising them to vote the wrong way, and to prioritize climate action in the wrong way. So the Citizens Climate Lobby sits down with members of Congress and shows them where their constituents actually are on different solutions, how worried they are about it – any of the things on the fact sheet are great conversations to have with members of Congress.
MELINDA TUHUS: Can you give me another example that’s different than that?
ERIC FINE: Yeah. Across the country, we are pretty bad at estimating where people are on climate change if you haven’t seen the research, whether you’re a leader, a random person walking down the street, a leader in civil society, a business owner. So, for example, Google, in their Google maps division, were thinking of creating a new feature on Google maps. And they said, Say you want to go from Point A to Point B, we want to put a little leaf next to the most energy-efficient way to get to Point B. Then there was a faction within that said, “We don’t ‘think people will be into that. We think they’ll want to delete our app or will give us negative feedback. Then the team at Google maps said, “Well, actually, look at this data from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication – people are more worried all over the place than we expected and they want climate action more than we think, so maybe we should try this anyway.” So the other folks said, “Okay, you’ve convinced us, let’s do it.” And now they’ve rolled out that feature, and they’ve calculated that the impact of that has been the equivalent of taking hundreds of thousands of cars off the road.
If you can do one thing about climate change, start talking about it. We know that the majority of people in the US are worried about climate change, but very few people are talking about it with their friends and family. When you do start talking about it, both you and the person you’re speaking with are more likely than before to say climate change is happening, it’s human caused, and you want to do something about it.
And beyond that, the next thing to do is vote.
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