Temperature highs, climate change salience, and Eco-anxiety: early evidence from the 2022 United Kingdom heatwave

Abstract

Extreme weather episodes may increase the salience of climate change and worsen people’s well-being. Empirically studying these effects is however challenging, given limited data availability around difficult-to-predict such events. Addressing this issue, I use Google Trends information to assess how climate change salience and people’s wellness were affected by an unprecedented mid-July 2022 heatwave in the United Kingdom, when temperatures exceeded 40C for the first time in the country’s history. I document a significant rise in the search-intensity for ‘climate change’, as well as for ‘worry’ as a marker of psychological distress at the time of the heatwave. In contrast, I show that similar patterns did not emerge in 2019, when comparably high temperatures were recorded, but when the 40C-threshold was not exceeded. Taken together, my results suggest that the effects of the 2022 heatwave are partially driven by a climate anxiety mechanism, wherein extreme weather episodes constitute negative signals for climate change progression. I conclude by discussing several limitations of my study that future work may tackle.