Abstract
Factors that contribute to the well-established ideology gap in climate change beliefs (i.e., conservatives’ scepticism about climate change and its severity) remain underexplored. In the present research, we propose that there are differences in the consideration of future consequences, as well as the perception of climate change in time, between conservatives and liberals which, in part, contribute to this gap. Across three studies (total N = 654) in the Netherlands and the UK, we demonstrate that, compared to liberals, conservatives tend to consider future consequences of their behaviour less and perceive the effects of climate change as further away in the future. Furthermore, we find that temporal distance to climate change, and, to a lesser extent, consideration of future consequences, can partially account for higher levels of scepticism about climate change on the conservative side of the ideological spectrum. Besides contributing to a better understanding of this ideology bias, these results have implications for climate change communication.
Highlights
Despite the clear scientific consensus on the need to substantially reduce greenhouse gas emissions to curb seismic consequences of climate change (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2021), there is still a considerable proportion of the public that has doubts about the severity or even the reality of anthropogenic climate change
There was no evidence of an association between slow life history strategy and climate scepticism or political ideology
We conducted a hierarchical linear regression analysis to test the relative importance of ideology in predicting climate scepticism when consideration of future con sequences (CFC) and temporal distance to climate change consequences are introduced as additional predictors
Summary
Despite the clear scientific consensus on the need to substantially reduce greenhouse gas emissions to curb seismic consequences of climate change (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2021), there is still a considerable proportion of the public that has doubts about the severity or even the reality of anthropogenic climate change. Relatively recent numbers show that in the UK, 34% of the population is not convinced the effects of climate change will be serious, while in the Netherlands, this pro portion is 39.4% (Poortinga et al, 2018). This gap between the scientific consensus on the urgency of climate change and public opinion has been the subject of intensive research in recent years. Though the relationship seems to be strongest in the US (Hornsey et al, 2018), it has been identified in other Western countries (McCright et al, 2016a; Rutjens & van der Lee, 2020 ; Rutjens et al, 2018)
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