Class, ideology, and severe weather: how the interaction of social and physical factors shape climate change threat perceptions among coastal US residents

Abstract

In recent years, researchers in the field of environmental sociology have broadened their methodological scope to include indicators of physical phenomena in order to more fully understand societal–environmental interactions, especially in the investigation of public views about climate change. While efforts to integrate social and physical data have been fruitful, there have been relatively few studies which examine the multiplicative effects of social and physical variables on views about climate change. Here, I combine survey data of coastal US residents from the Communities and Environment in Rural America (CERA) project with severe weather events data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Storm Events Database in order to investigate whether and how individual-level factors interact with county-level biophysical factors to influence public perceptions of the threat of climate change. I find that household income, political party affiliation, beliefs about climate change, and property damage from severe weather events interact in a variety of ways to influence individuals’ views about the threat climate change poses in their lifetimes. This study expands upon the extant literature on public views about climate change by demonstrating complex interactions between sociodemographic characteristics of individuals and biophysical phenomena impacting their regions of residence.