英文摘要: | To the Editor —
In their recent Letter in Nature Climate Change, Howe et al1. draw attention to the scientific and policy importance of local-scale data on public perceptions about climate change. Climate perceptions exhibit place-to-place variation2, but local-scale social data often do not exist. To better resolve local variations, Howe and co-authors present results from downscaling methods applied to national surveys to characterize perceptions in US states, 435 congressional districts and 3,143 counties. Their validation exercise compares downscaled results with direct estimates from surveys asking a related climate change question.
Here we undertake a broader validation exercise using independent survey data from 30 US counties. Howe et al. caution that their method understates place-to-place variation, and our results reinforce this, but we also find evidence that their estimates are unbiased and moderately correlated with direct measurements even at smaller scales.
A general question about climate change beliefs (Supplementary Information) was asked as part of surveys by the Community and Environment in Rural America (CERA) and Communities and Forests in Oregon (CAFOR) projects that targeted selected and often non-metropolitan counties3, 4, 5. Figure 1 illustrates belief in anthropogenic climate change as estimated by Howe et al. against direct measures from 30 counties where CERA/CAFOR completed at least 100 interviews. The +0.46 correlation (p < 0.05) seems encouraging given the expected imprecision of the Howe et al. method for small geographies, compounded by sampling variation in CERA/CAFOR. For 17 of these counties the estimates fall within CERA/CAFOR confidence intervals. |