So, what do you believe?

• Author: Drake, Nora
• Position: The Environment

"One major takeaway from the Yale Climate Opinion Maps is that many Americans feel removed from climate change, both in time and distance."

Avast majority of Americans--70%, according to recent research--think global warming indeed is occurring. That is encouraging for climate scientists, but the number does not paint a complete picture. To understand what people in each county, city, and even congressional district in the U.S. believe about climate change requires an extremely detailed, easily navigable opinion map.

Enter Matto Mildenberger, assistant professor of political science at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who well knows the challenges of creating a tool that reflects accurately the beliefs of disparate areas within the U.S. He was a key player on the team that has made just such a map.

Mildenberger, a member of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, was a driving force behind collecting the data and creating a model (the Yale Climate Opinion Maps) that details climate energy beliefs at every level--from the national down to the hyper-local.

'The impetus for the project was that much of our understanding of the distribution and dynamics of public belief ends up relying on national surveys, and sometimes state polls, but we don't really have a good understanding of the variation in beliefs and opinions at a local scale. These smaller political geographies are relevant for both political decisionmaking around climate change and adaptation and policy planning."

The group's goal was to create maps--using data it collected, estimated, and validated--that effectively could detail public perception of the issues surrounding global warming and climate change. Mildenberger, who worked closely with Peter Howe, assistant professor of environment and society at Utah State University, and other scientists, indicates that, though the maps could benefit policymakers, they were not developed with a single audience in mind.

"There are a number of audiences, including a big research audience. We see our role not as being advocates, but as providing objective information using the best possible quantitative techniques on the distribution of this opinion." In fact, the data is available for anyone to download.

Data for the Yale Climate Opinion Maps--and the model used to produce them--was drawn from a national survey that asked respondents multiple questions about their climate beliefs, including risk perceptions (i.e., how...