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Abstract Public attitudes toward climate change influence climate and energy policies and guide individual mitigation and adaptation behaviors. Over the last decade, as scientific certainty about the causes and impacts of, and solutions to the climate crisis has increased, cities, states, and regions in the United States have pursued diverse policy strategies. Yet, our understanding of how Americans’ climate views are changing remains largely limited to national trends. Here we use a large US survey dataset ( N = 27 075 ) to estimate dynamic, state-level changes in 16 climate change beliefs, risk perceptions, and policy preferences over 13 years (2008–2020). We find increases in global warming issue importance and perceived harm in every state. Policy support, however, increased in more liberal states like California and New York, but remained stable elsewhere. Year-by-year estimates of state-level climate opinions can be used to support sub-national mitigation and adaptation efforts that depend on public support and engagement. 

Abstract As climate change intensifies, global publics will experience more unusual weather and extreme weather events. How will individual experiences with these weather trends shape climate change beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors? In this article, we review 73 papers that have studied the relationship between climate change experiences and public opinion. Overall, we find mixed evidence that weather shapes climate opinions. Although there is some support for a weak effect of local temperature and extreme weather events on climate opinion, the heterogeneity of independent variables, dependent variables, study populations, and research designs complicate systematic comparison. To advance research on this critical topic, we suggest that future studies pay careful attention to differences between self-reported and objective weather data, causal identification, and the presence of spatial autocorrelation in weather and climate data. Refining research designs and methods in future studies will help us understand the discrepancies in results, and allow better detection of effects, which have important practical implications for climate communication. As the global population increasingly experiences weather conditions outside the range of historical experience, researchers, communicators, and policymakers need to understand how these experiences shape-and are shaped by-public opinions and behaviors.