Climate Disasters Only Slightly Shift the Political Needle

Even amid what seems like a never-ending series of deadly and destructive climate extremes across the country, including heat waves in the Southwest, wildfires in California and hurricanes and flooding in the Southeast, social and political scientists say climate is still not a major issue for U.S. voters. Despite the deaths and destruction that Hurricanes Milton and Helene inflicted on North Carolina and Florida just a month before Election Day, the storms are unlikely to swing many votes, the researchers report.

“I watched for many years the hypothesis that hurricanes or other events would move the needle on public opinion, but saw little evidence of response to individual events,” said Lawrence Hamilton, a professor of sociology at the University of New Hampshire who researches public views of science, the environment, climate change and human-environment interactions.

He said there was a slow upward trend in climate awareness and response through 2020 that may have been interrupted by the COVID pandemic, but he said the data suggests that single extreme events did not have much of an effect on voters. 

Increasing public awareness of global warming and its prioritization as an issue reflected a cumulative effect from climate coverage in the news. In addition to extreme weather and disasters, attention to climate issues spiked in the runup to the annual United Nations climate summits, Hamilton explained.

“I hope recent events change more minds and expect that many other climate-concerned people hope the same,” he said. That could change as extremes happen more frequently, but the studies he conducted from 2010 to 2020 don’t show the needle moving in response to climate disasters, he added.

“Unfortunately, the post-COVID landscape has introduced a worse possibility: that is, to blame extreme events on conspiracies,” he said. “[Former President Donald] Trump and [billionaire Elon] Musk are leading the way in spreading lies to blame Milton and Helene disasters on their fabricated claims about the federal government response.”

Disinformation and misinformation about recent climate-driven disasters folds into the bigger network of conspiracies about democracy, science, health care and other issues, he said.

“Trumpism, with its election rejection, climate denialism and anti-vax militance, and Musk with his Twitter megaphone, are pouring gasoline on conspiracist fires. To believers, it does not matter that conspiracies might contradict each other,” he said. “They agree on the rejection of science and consensus reality, and on the special knowledge of conspiracy believers.”

The recent outbreak of misinformation surrounding Hurricanes Helene and Milton was as extreme as the climate itself, and even included death threats to meteorologists, The Guardian reported.

If there’s a small bright spot of hope, it’s that some recent research has found the partisan divide is sometimes bridged in discussions narrowly focused on disaster response. But that’s not addressing the root of the problem.

“Political Wind Shear”

Measuring how the public responds to climate extremes and disasters like Helene and Milton is important, but it’s not easy, said Max Boykoff, an environmental scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder who studies how global warming and its effects are covered by the media.

“In general terms, whenever we experience these things or read about them, it shapes the way that we’re continuing to determine what we do, and how people vote,” he said. But looking back at how much public opinion shifted after other major climate-linked extremes suggests the impact is limited.

“This makes me think about back in 2012, when Superstorm Sandy crossed D.C. and New York,” he said. “There were a slew of policy decisions going on and a lot of people were saying, ‘This is going to be a tipping point where folks in D.C. are really going to start taking climate change seriously at the policy level.’ It didn’t really bear out. It had very limited influence.”

Boykoff’s research group tracks how ecological and weather events feed into political dynamics and other aspects of society, and how that all comes together and shapes change. He said they haven’t found that any particular hurricane has had a significant impact on how people react to climate change.

“I had a friend over in the U.K. asking me, ‘Is this going to be the October surprise?’” he said, referring to Hurricane Milton. “‘Is this going to be a way in which climate action is sparked in the United States?’ I wish that were to be the case.”

But looking back at Superstorm Sandy, and considering how politicized the issue has become today, he said he doesn’t really expect the recent climate disasters to have a big effect on public perception and reaction to the climate crisis, nor a big political impact.

The polarization, especially, “is sort of like political wind shear that seems to take away the strength of possible climate action,” he said.

Conspiracy Backlash

Another bad sign is that, even in a year marked by repeated devastating and deadly climate disasters, overall media coverage of climate dropped off compared to previous years. And that coverage doesn’t necessarily increase when there are climate extremes like floods or heat waves. Boykoff said his research group’s tracker shows that media coverage spiked to an all-time high in 2009 ahead of the Copenhagen COP15 gathering, when climate was a high-profile political issue.

No single climate event or climate story is going to be a silver bullet that will shift attitudes, beliefs and behavior, he said. But the cumulative effect of stories “covering how all these different dimensions of a changing climate come together can move us in a different direction,” he said. “And that’s where the accuracy, and connecting up the dots between these stories, is important over time.”

In terms of the immediate impacts of the two hurricanes and the flooding in parts of the Southeast, the conspiracy backlash could strengthen Trump in key swing states, said Reinhard Steurer, a political scientist and climate researcher at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences in Vienna. 

He said research suggests that some people do learn from climate disasters and perhaps even increase their efforts, but probably not those people who most need convincing.

“Given the strong denial and conspiracy stories circulating in disaster areas, I would not be surprised if the current events strengthened Trump instead of Harris,” he said. To prevent more and more people from “going down that rabbit hole, it’s important for mainstream media to make a serious effort to debunk the denial and conspiracy stories.”

Steurer said it’s well-known that climate denial is crucial to the identity of many right-wing voters “because they hate the needed solutions that would require more government regulation.”

He added, “What we see now is that denial comes under pressure when the climate crisis hits. If these people were rational, they would change their mind and conclude, ‘OK, I was wrong, let’s face the facts and do something about it.’ But most people are not rational, but they rationalize their worldview. And how do they rescue denial when they are literally threatened to be blown away? They need a conspiracy story to explain the unexplainable.” 

“Given the strong denial and conspiracy stories circulating in disaster areas, I would not be surprised if the current events strengthened Trump instead of Harris.”

Reinhard Steurer, University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences in Vienna

The most popular conspiracy, Steurer said, seems to be that the Biden administration directed hurricanes into Republican territory to teach them a lesson about climate change.

“If you really believe this, your denial is safe,” he said. “This is almost funny if it would not harm people and impact the election.”

Hopeful Signs?

Over the long run, there are some signs that the acceleration of destructive climate extremes does change public opinion, at least in small increments, said António Valentim, an assistant professor of European politics at the London School of Economics and Political Science who has been studying how climate extremes affect political dynamics for several years.

“In general, my reading of the literature is a ‘yes, we see people moving in terms of their concern about climate change, climate policy preferences or demand for climate policy, and even voting behavior,’” he said. 

“There are some papers suggesting that people vote more for Green parties or vote more for referendums and amendments on climate and environmental issues,” he said. “So we do see some movement after different extreme weather events, be it heat waves, wildfires or flooding.” 

But the effects are small and short-lived. And, Valentim added, there is also evidence that the people who are more likely to react tend to be wealthier and more highly educated. Shifts break down along party lines.

“The U.S. research shows that wildfires increase support for pro-environmental amendments in California, and that the effects there are mainly driven by Democratic areas,” he said. That suggests those people who react to extremes are already more open to belief in climate change, he said.

Climate-disaster response is one area where research is “starting to show some convergence between opposing sides of the climate debate,” said Ted Hsuan Yun Chen, an assistant professor at George Mason University who researches climate politics.

“There are some recent studies that show direct experience with disasters closes the partisan gap on climate-related attitudes, especially when it comes to preferences about policy that address the impacts of climate change,” he said. 

“Can we leverage disaster experiences, which more and more people are now having, into our climate messaging?” he asked. “For now, I think it’s fair to say we don’t fully understand the nuances of why this pattern exists.” 

Valentim added that some papers from Germany suggest that the Green Party gains voters in reaction to climate extremes, but it’s hard to separate that effect from other factors, like the massive civil society climate movement sparked by Greta Thunberg and Fridays For Future, which has been credited for partly boosting the German Green Party in the 2021 national elections.

Most of the studies Valentim is involved with compare the responses of people in the same country, in areas that have been affected by extremes with areas that were not, he explained. But the research also can show why people in different countries may have different responses to climate extremes, he added.

“In the U.S., I think this issue is way more polarized and polarizing than in many other places,” he said. “The vast majority of people already have a very clear political identity and by now have made decisions as to how they’re going to vote.”

In the political context of the U.S. election and the disinformation campaigns surrounding the recent hurricanes, Valentim said it’s also important to note research showing that whether people are happy or unhappy with the incumbent response to a climate disaster likely shifts votes.

If the response is perceived as good, incumbents are rewarded, but if it is perceived as bad, voters may turn against the government, and the closer the event is to an election, the more pronounced the effect.

“I think one thing that is slightly different than what it used to be 10 or 15 years ago is that now you have a set of politicians and political elites who are willing to give space [to], if not verbalize, those conspiracy theories,” he said. 

That not only puts the conspiracy theories on the map, Valentim added, but also legitimizes them in a way that might make more voters feel at ease with sharing those opinions.

He said that perhaps the thing that surprised him the most coming out of those years of research is how static that societies and political systems have been in response to the growing climate crisis, compared to their reactions to other issues, like crime or migration, for example.

“I went into this research thinking that the climate crisis was something so fundamentally different, so urgent that it will almost take care of itself,” he said. “And I think realizing that’s not necessarily the case has been humbling.”