Glob. Environ. Change http://doi.org/jb2 (2012)

Direct experience of climate change is limited by the difficulty of discerning it from the variability of everyday weather. Yet research has shown that some people think they have personally experienced global warming.

Karen Akerlof of the George Mason University, USA, and co-workers analysed what signals of climate change people believe they are detecting, why, and whether it matters, through four studies using population survey and climate data from a county in Michigan. They found that 27% of the county's adult residents said they had personally experienced global warming and that the most frequently described experiences were changes in seasons (36%), weather (25%), lake levels (24%), animals and plants (20%), and snowfall (19%). The researchers found also that experienced changes in seasons, storm events and lake levels were consistent with the climatic record. Finally, they showed that — once controlled for demographics, political affiliation and cultural beliefs about national policy outcomes — personal experience predicts perceptions of local risk of global warming.