Does the weather affect people’s views on climate change? A new paper looks at how people link the two, and finds the British public focus on wet weather rather than rising temperatures when worrying about climate change.

But working out whether people revise their concern about climate change based on the weather is a more complicated task.

Existing attitudes

The researchers from Leeds University asked people whether they thought the weather had become more changeable and, if so, in what way. They then asked the same people about the seriousness of climate change in order to compare their responses.

They found that people who were already concerned about climate change tended to think the weather had become more changeable. This was true regardless of the respondents age, gender, or educational background. Co-author Dr Andrea Taylor tells Carbon Brief:

“We observed an association between perceptions of changes in weather and beliefs about climate change, which may indicate that experience of recent weather does impact on people’s concerns about climate change.”

That finding led the BBC to report that the research shows extreme weather changes people’s perception of climate change.

But that conclusion is slightly premature. The people who thought the weather had become more changeable already had strong views on climate change. However, the research can’t say if people held those views because of the weather, or for some other reason. It may be the case, for example, that people’s strong views on climate change have changed how they perceive the weather.

It’s a bit of a chicken and egg situation. Yesterday’s paper shows people see the link between the chicken and the egg. It doesn’t tell you which came first.

Wet weather

More interesting than the fact that people’s views on the weather and climate change concern may be linked is the research’s findings on which kind of weather matches that concern.

The research shows Brits who think climate change is a serious problem focus on the weather getting wetter in recent years, rather than hotter, as is the case in other countries.

That result largely fits with the UK public’s expectations for what will happen as climate change worsens. Carbon Brief’s polling showed most people thought there would be more rain as a result of climate change. Many fewer said there would be more heatwaves.

“That perhaps makes sense, because we don’t get hot summers very often and when we do people often respond to them quite favourably”, Taylor says.

The paper suggests that campaigners should focus on wet events if they want to get the UK public to care about climate change, rather than heatwaves.

This may already be happening to an extent. After large parts of the UK were hit by storms and flooding last winter, a debate belatedly broke out over climate change’s impact on extreme weather. That conversation was partially driven by NGO campaigns to heighten awareness of the link.

That episode wasn’t included in Taylor’s research as the survey was conducted in early 2013. Taylor expects those results to show up in a new study her research group is currently finalising, however.