Veronica Iordanova remembers Octobers rising up in Arizona when it was too chilly to trick-or-treat in a short-sleeved Halloween costume. She will be able to’t think about that anymore.

The summer time warmth lasts longer and feels extra intense now, and he or she is aware of that could be a results of human-caused international warming. She worries about her and her household’s future.

“We need to realistically look at the situation and realize it’s not going to get better,” mentioned Iordanova, who lives in Tempe.

Throughout the U.S., many individuals live by means of some of the brutal summers of their lives. And a few psychologists imagine the eye on a cascade of record-shattering warmth, wildfire smoke, excessive flooding and Jacuzzi-hot ocean water may very well be “another turning point” in efforts to raise awareness about the everyday impact of climate change, as Cornell University climate scientist Natalie Mahowald put it. That’s a crucial step to prompt collective action on global warming.

The recognition that human-caused climate change is already contributing extreme weather has been gaining traction for a few years now among Americans.

“This definitely feels like we’re in that point of no return that people have talked about for a long time,” said Stephen Escudero of Miami, who says this has been the worst summer he’s ever seen in his 38 years living there.

For years, Anthony Leiserowitz, the director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, was unable to see any sign in the data that extreme weather was influencing Americans to think differently about climate change. That started changing around 2016, he said, when more people started connecting their experiences of extreme heat and drought with broader climate patterns.

A majority of people in the U.S. understand that climate change is real and caused at least in part by human activity. Over half of the general public say extreme weather that they’ve experienced was at least partly a result of climate change, according to an AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll. Yale’s polling asks about personal experiences using a different measure and finds that 44% of people say they have personally experienced global warming.

Leiserowitz notes that an extremely small yet vocal climate-denying minority can tend to dominate the discourse — Iordanova and Escudero expressed that they feel alone in their beliefs about climate change even though they’re in the majority, and public sentiment has been gradually moving in their direction over time.

Nevertheless, “there’s still a long ways to go before Americans have fully understood what’s happening here” with climate change, Leiserowitz said.

Sometimes personal experiences end up being a more compelling measure than peer-reviewed research.

“Back then I was like, oh, my gosh, you know, climate change, that’s horrible,” mentioned Paul Bowyer, who grew up in Arizona and now alternates his time between Northern California and Costa Rica. He mentioned that he was within the messages coming from political figures like Al Gore, however over time, the urgency pale away and left him feeling like he hadn’t seen an excessive amount of distinction within the climate.

“The thing is, nothing has changed,” he mentioned. Although he acknowledged that this 12 months introduced the worst snowstorm he is ever seen after years of drought — 5 ft of snow on his deck was “not normal,” he mentioned — he interpreted that as an act of Mom Nature to “replenish” issues moderately than as something too regarding.

Nonetheless, some researchers suppose as extra folks expertise excessive climate, extra will change their minds in the other way of Bowyer. Leiserowitz identified that excessive warmth is highly effective as a result of it is simpler to attach with the idea of “global warming,” despite the fact that that warming additionally contributes to much less intuitively-connected occasions like stronger hurricanes, extra intense rainfall and different wacky climate.

And extremely seen occasions in locations the place they don’t seem to be usually anticipated — like warmth waves in locations with out air-con infrastructure, or wildfire smoke on the East Coast and within the Midwest — may be extra noticeable to folks. When threatened by pure disasters, “even for people who aren’t willing to call it climate change, they’re willing to say like, ‘there’s a problem and I want to protect my home,’” mentioned Kaitlin Raimi, an affiliate professor of public coverage on the College of Michigan who teaches a course on the psychology of local weather change.

Mahowald famous that boilerplate scientific strategies are actually permitting researchers to extra shortly and reliably join short-term excessive climate occasions and long-term local weather patterns. However minds will not change in a single day, as a result of beliefs about local weather change may be deeply tied to long-held notions of non-public id.

“What I keep hoping to see is a more nuanced understanding of how difficult it is to change beliefs and a way to help people make that bridge, to close that gap,” mentioned Barbara Hofer, a professor emerita of psychology at Middlebury Faculty.

Monica Castellanos, a scholar in Miami, mentioned that she feels unhappy when she thinks about individuals who aren’t open to accepting local weather science. “More of the older generations are just like, ‘ah no, it’s just hot.’ Like no, the planet’s dying,” she mentioned. “A lot of people don’t seem to take it seriously.”

But Gale Sinatra, a professor of education and psychology at the University of Southern California who co-wrote a book on science denial with Hofer, highlighted the fact that many people have been exposed to climate change misinformation for a long time.

“It isn’t really individuals’ faults if they hear climate change is a hoax, they hear it’s a conspiracy,” Sinatra mentioned. “They’ve been sort of introduced to those views systemically by bad actors who are specifically trying to obfuscate the problem, usually for financial or sometimes political gain.”

The real psychological test for the coming decades will be to see whether personal experiences cause people not only embrace the science of climate change but also to take action in addressing it.

“Emotions can be a barrier because we want to disconnect from things that make us uncomfortable,” she said, but they can also “be leveraged to in a more positive way, get us engaged in in activities that are that are motivating us towards solutions.”

___

Seth Borenstein Washington, D.C., Thomas Machowicz in Phoenix, Brittany Peterson in Denver, Daniel Kozin in Miami and Joshua Bickel in Cincinnati, Ohio, contributed to this report.

___

Comply with Melina Walling on Twitter @MelinaWalling.

___

Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Copyright 2023 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.