One of the surveys this story relies on to claim a sweeping climate stress problem is a Harris poll conducted for the American Psychological Association. This is where the 47% number comes from. Is this number plausible? Do other results from this survey make sense? Let’s look.
https://twitter.com/Sammy_Roth/status/1343309472140206082
That poll first asks if climate change is the most important problem facing society today. 56% say yes. But what if you don’t ask a leading question? We can compare; Gallup asks open-ended what’s the biggest problem facing the country. Only ~3% give environment-related answers.
So we can see that priming people by asking directly if climate change is today’s most important problem, you can get more than an extra 50% to say yes compared to how many would say that unprompted. Already a bad sign about this data.
The poll then proceeds to ask respondents what they personally are doing about climate change. And then it asks if climate change stresses them out. Do you think maybe that line of questioning influences the answers elicited?
If climate stress were really as rampant as these articles say, we wouldn’t need to invent new theories like “climate stress” to convince people to care about climate change.
There is a lot of terrible survey research out there. It makes it into press more often when it confirms useful priors.
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