Experience, Narratives, and Climate Change Beliefs

Linking the location and timing of FEMA-declared disasters to large-scale electoral survey data, we study how the experience of a natural disaster affects climate change beliefs, and how experience interacts with ideology. Contrary to the predictions of standard learning models, we find evidence for divergence in beliefs – exposure to the same disaster event increases stated climate change and environmental concerns among liberals, but decreases them among conservatives, widening the ideological gap by 11-17%. We further provide evidence of conflicting ideological media discourse on climate change in the aftermath of disasters by applying Chat-GPT as a novel text annotation approach. Our findings are consistent with natural disasters making the debate around climate change and partisan cleavages on this issue more salient and further polarizing initial beliefs.