Do You Think Global Warming Will Harm You Personally?

By Sarah Melotte | The Daily Yonder

Editor’s Note: This post is from our data newsletter, the Rural Index, headed by Sarah Melotte, the Daily Yonder’s data reporter. Subscribe to get a weekly map straight to your inbox. 

If you had asked me six months ago whether I thought climate change would harm me personally, I would have responded with a hesitant “‘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.”

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 of nonmetropolitan counties to define rural in this analysis.

At the national level, about 38% of rural Americans and 41% of metropolitan Americans think that climate change will harm them personally either a moderate amount or a great deal. 

The greatest differences in climate opinion exist between different states and regions, not rural and urban counties. It’s at least one opinion not subject to the epochal rural urban divide, the great new American faultline. 

Rural Alaskans and Hawaiians worry the most about climate change harming them personally compared to other rural respondents in the survey. As an aggregate, about 49% of rural Alaskans and Hawaiians say they believe they’ll be harmed (or are already being harmed) by climate change.

Only time will tell how climate opinions will shift as environmental crises become more commonplace. In the 2024 survey, will more rural North Carolinians say they think global warming will harm them, given the catastrophic flooding brought on by Hurricane Helene?

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