Building public consensus about the threat of climate change is critical for enacting meaningful action to address it. The Climate Change in the American Mind (CCAM) project has been conducting nationally representative surveys on public opinion about climate change biannually since 2008. An audience segmentation of CCAM respondents based on their climate change beliefs, risk perceptions, policy preferences, and behaviors identifies six distinct attitude groups, called Global Warming’s Six Americas, including the Alarmed, Concerned, Cautious, Disengaged, Doubtful, and Dismissive. These groups form a spectrum from most to least concerned about the issue, but each group is distinct from the others in various ways. Investigation of how public climate opinions are changing through the lens of the “Six Americas” shows that Americans are becoming more worried over time, and these shifts correlate with changes in policy support and engagement. However, opinion trends vary within key groups and suggest that climate communication strategies for some audiences may need to be adapted. Further analysis of the spatial variations in climate opinions suggests that more locally-tailored engagement efforts that address the heterogeneous expression of climate impacts are also warranted.
About the Speaker
Jennifer Marlon, Ph.D. is a Senior Research Scientist at the Yale School of the Environment and the Director of Data Science at the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication (YPCCC). Her research employs natural science methods to examine how climate change affects extreme weather and social science methods to examine how people perceive and respond to climate changes. Dr. Marlon also produces interactive communication tools like the Yale Climate Opinion Maps and the Six Americas Super Short Survey (SASSY). She teaches classes at Yale in Climate Change and Environmental Data Visualization for Communication. She has published over 70 peer-reviewed papers in journals such as Science and Nature Climate Change.
This talk is part of the Ecology Seminar Series, sponsored by the following Penn State entities:
- The Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences
- The Institute of Energy and the Environment
- The Earth and Environmental Systems Institute
- The Department of Communications Arts and Sciences
Hosted by Dr. Manzhu Yu, the seminar is open to faculty, students, staff, and other researchers.