If you had asked me six months ago whether I thought climate change would harm me personally, “Yes,” an answer informed by an intellectual understanding of environmental catastrophe. I would have tried to come up with an abstract example. I’d probably garble some mess about food supply chains or drought or vulnerable infrastructure. Something vague, impersonal.If you were to ask me the same question today, I’d tell you not to trust insurance maps, that a 1,000 year flood could, in fact, happen in your lifetime. I’d scoff at the idea of a “climate haven,” a term coined to describe areas like Asheville, North Carolina, a city an hour south of me in the Appalachian mountains, that are unlikely to experience environmental crises.I wasn’t even in town when Hurricane Helene flooded downtown Bakersville, North Carolina, a rural town near the Tennessee state line where I live with my partner. But the event left an imprint on my psyche. I came home from a reporting trip to an intact house with a small roof leak, and yet I close my eyes and see rising water.If you live in a town that hasn’t burned, flooded, or dried up in recent memory, you might only give climate change a passing thought, or pay no mind to it at all. You might have never thought about it as a potentially personal phenomenon.That’s what the Yale Climate Opinion Survey suggests. Researchers at the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication conduct an annual survey about public opinions on climate change to capture the diversity of opinions about the environment at multiple geographic scales.Data captured through the fall of 2023 show that rural people who live in coastal states and the Southwest are more likely to answer that they think global warming will harm them personally either “a moderate amount’ or ‘a great deal.” Houses, seen on Aug. 2, 2022, teeter on the edge of an Utqiagvik bluff that is being rapidly eroded by permafrost thaw. The house on the right has been abandoned. At the base of the bluff are SuperSacks filled with sand, placed there as part of the effort to hold back ocean waves and slow down erosion. (Photo by Yereth Rosen/Alaska Beacon)Take Hawaii, for example. In Hawaii a greater share of the population believes climate change will harm them compared to other Americans, which makes intuitive sense, given that the state is a small cluster of islands in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. If sea level rise is a concern anywhere, you’d think it would be here.About 52% of Hawaiians believe that climate change will harm them personally, compared to only 39% of Americans at large.Rural Hawaiians are slightly less likely to believe that climate change will harm them personally, but the difference is so small that it could just be statistical noise. Approximately 51% of rural Hawaiians think that climate change will harm them personally, compared to about 53% of urban and suburban Hawaiians. I’m using the Office of Management and Budget category
Sab. Gen 11th, 2025
