Linking Hurricanes to Climate Change? Not So Easy.
The text below a reposting of something that I published on Oct 2, 2017 on “Medium”. On the basis of data from Google Trends, I proposed that, on the average, the public had not perceived the link of climate change with the spate of hurricanes of 2017. A few weeks later, it seems that my observation was correct: the latest polls indicate that the American public is slowly (very slowly) awakening to the idea of human-caused climate change, but that the 2017 hurricane season has not triggered a substantial change of views. Here is the post.
Above: the results of a Google Trends search for the term “climate change”. The recent wave of Caribbean hurricanes has had little effect on the number of searches on the Web. Most people just didn’t think that hurricanes and climate change are linked to each other.
We all live inside our specific information cocoons where we hear from sources we tend to trust.
If you, like me, live in a cocoon where it is generally agreed that human-caused climate change is real and dangerous, then you would think that the recent series of hurricanes hitting the US should have made a great impact on the public perception of the climate change threat. The impression I had from the messages I received and what I read from my sources of information is of an onrush of excitation that made it clear to everybody sane in his/her mind that we need to act against climate change before it is too late.
Ahem, no.
This is a classic example of the working of echo chambers. Out there, in the world of the mainstream media, the link between hurricanes and climate change was occasionally mentioned but that had little or no effect on people’s perception of the issue.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
