Giving Compass' Take:

• Jeremy Craig reports that one effective way to change the minds of climate change skeptics is to highlight the enormous costs that climate change will inflict. 

• How can funders help to spread awareness and spark action to prevent and mitigate disastrous climate change? 

• Learn more about convincing climate change skeptics.

In 2017, Palm and colleagues in the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies analyzed data from a panel of 9,500 respondents who answered the same question about climate change in 2010 and 2014. They found that direct experience with warmer weather, drought, and weather-related natural disasters had a very small impact on the respondents’ acceptance of climate change.

What did matter was whether they identified as a Democrat or a Republican. Between 2010 and 2014, Americans’ opinions about climate change became more polarized by political affiliation, increasingly aligning with those of others in the same political party.

“Once attitudes are politicized, they are difficult to change,” says Palm. “Once a position has been taken, such as loyalty to a team, people reject new information as tainted or propaganda.”

Political attitudes toward climate change may not be completely intractable, though. In the 1970s, after all, the United States took bipartisan action to limit aerosols and reduce air pollution, and founded the Environmental Protection Agency.

So what could convince climate change skeptics to change their minds? Palm believes that focusing on the economics of climate change—such as its effect on housing markets in areas of sea level rise, flooding, and wildfires—could be key.

Read the full article about climate change skeptics by Jeremy Craig at Futurity.