Majority of Americans Link Extreme Weather and Climate Change

More than two-thirds of U.S. adults believe global warming made several recent extreme weather events even worse, according to a new survey. According to the report, released by the Yale Project on Climate Change Communications and George Mason University’s Center for Climate Change Communication, 82 percent of respondents said they had experienced one or more types of extreme weather events in the last year, and 35 percent said they were personally harmed either a great deal or moderately. In the case of several high-profile weather events, a majority of respondents believe that climate change exacerbated the events, including unusually high temperatures during the past winter (72 percent), record-high temperatures last summer (70 percent), the 2011 droughts in Texas and Oklahoma (69 percent), and the Mississippi River floods during the spring of 2011 (63 percent). “Americans may be starting to ‘internalize’ climate change,” said Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication.