Temperature trends, not economic trends, seem to drive changes in opinion.
Jon Krosnick of Stanford University and colleagues studied the post-2008 drop in the number of people who think global warming is occurring and concluded it had little to do with two major events of that year: the economic recession or the media coverage of “Climategate” — the release of thousands of emails and documents related to global warming research.
Rather, they found that opinion about global warming seemed to fluctuate with temperature changes. Although the beliefs of people who trust natural scientists remain steady over time, climate beliefs among the one-third of Americans who don’t trust natural scientists are influenced by the prior year’s average world temperature.
“Following record-high-temperature years, low-trust people are more likely to believe that the world has been warming,” Mr. Krosnick said. “Extreme weather events, however, have not had notable impact on public judgments of the existence or the seriousness of global warming.”
There is reason to think that global temperatures, after having been somewhat steady in recent years, are likely to begin rising again, thanks to a buildup of carbon emissions and the arrival of El Niño. If so, belief in global warming may soon rise again, too.