Disaster experience mitigates the partisan divide on climate change: Evidence from Texas

Abstract

Despite the abundance of real world events and scientific information linking the worsening extreme weather to climate change, public attitudes toward climate issues in the United States remain highly divided along partisan lines. We compare the effect of different stimuli linking extreme weather events to climate change – personal experiences and scientific information – in reducing the partisan gap. A two-wave survey corresponding to multiple extreme weather events in Texas, including a natural experiment with power outage data from the 2021 North American Winter Storms, shows that personal experiences with extreme weather reduce the partisan divide in climate beliefs and polices. Scientific information attributing extreme weather events to climate change, however, had no effect in closing the partisan gap. These findings suggest that extreme climate events and disaster experiences force vividly tangible information about the proximity and severity of climate change on exposed individuals, prompting belief-updating and preference-shifting toward pro-climate policies.