Planetary Health Research Digest

The vast majority of climate scientists—around 97%—agree that the climate is changing as a result of human activity. Despite this almost unanimous consensus, conspiracy theories that climate change is in fact a hoax still proliferate throughout the world. It is possible that disbelief in climate change is fuelled by the less immediately tangible nature of the threat. Therefore, in their new two-wave longitudinal study, Hoi-Wing Chan (The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of China) and colleagues hypothesise that personal experience of local temperature anomalies (eg, unusually hot summers and warm winters) might influence people's beliefs in climate change conspiracies.