Dataset Information

Extreme weather events and the politics of climate change attribution.

ABSTRACT: The consequences of climate change are becoming increasingly visible in the form of more severe wildfires, hurricanes, and flooding. As the science linking these disasters to climate change has grown more robust, it has led to pressure on politicians to acknowledge the connection. While an analysis of U.S. Congressional press releases reveals a slight increase in politicians' willingness to do so, many remain hesitant. Why? We hypothesize that climate change attribution can backfire, harming politicians' popularity and undermining their ability to adapt to the visible manifestations of climate change. We conduct an original survey experiment on a representative sample of American adults and show that when a politician links wildfires to climate change, Republicans perceive the official as less capable of addressing weather-related disasters. In addition, Republicans become less supportive of efforts to protect against similar disasters in the future. Our findings shed light on the potential trade-offs of conveying the link between climate change and its impacts.

SUBMITTER: Hai Z

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9462684 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Extreme weather events and the politics of climate change attribution.

Hai Zuhad Z Perlman Rebecca L RL

Science advances 20220909 36

The consequences of climate change are becoming increasingly visible in the form of more severe wildfires, hurricanes, and flooding. As the science linking these disasters to climate change has grown more robust, it has led to pressure on politicians to acknowledge the connection. While an analysis of U.S. Congressional press releases reveals a slight increase in politicians' willingness to do so, many remain hesitant. Why? We hypothesize that climate change attribution can backfire, harming pol ...[more]

PMID: 36083896

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Project description:Bangladesh is susceptible to climate change, thus a detailed study, including the analyses of trends, sub-trends, extreme events and indices was conducted to obtain a complete picture of the climate change pattern in Bangladesh utilizing daily rainfall, maximum, minimum and average temperature data of 26 stations from 1975 to 2019 using R 4.0.2 software. For the trend analysis Mann Kendal (MK), modified Mann Kendall (mMK), Innovative Trend Analysis (ITA) and Sen's slope methods were used. Sub-trend analysis was conducted using ITA. Standard Anomaly Index (SAI) has been used to identify the frequency and severity of extreme events. ClimPACT2 software was used to check the homogeneity and calculate the extremes of temperature and rainfall data. Our analysis showed that during the last four decades, climate variables changed their patterns and trend heterogeneously over Bangladesh. Most stations showed decremental rainfall trend when central part of the country showed a substantial decrease. The northern and central parts of the country showed significant growth of trend for annual average temperature. The temperature in the monsoon season increased, whereas those in dry season decreased. The rainfall and maximum temperature were inversely related during monsoon whereas during dry season both of them decrease. The pre-monsoon and post-monsoonal rainfall also showed decreasing trends, indicating prevailing drought conditions especially in northern and central parts of the country. The SAI analysis showed alternating drought and wet years in almost all the stations. In the past 20 years, the country's western region experienced more drought years than before whereas the coastal region experienced more wet years. The analysis of climate extreme indices suggests that, Consecutive Dry Days (CDD), Hot Days (TX90P) and Hot Nights (TN90P) show significant increasing trend throughout the country. The agricultural productivity, water resource management and food security are anticipated to benefit from this study.

Dataset Information

Extreme weather events and the politics of climate change attribution.

Publications

Extreme weather events and the politics of climate change attribution.

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