Weather and Climate Variability May Be Poor Proxies for Climate Change in Farmer Risk Perceptions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Despite long-standing assertions that climate change creates new risk management challenges, the climate change adaptation literature persists in assuming, both implicitly and explicitly, that weather and climate variability are suitable proxies for climate change in evaluating farmers’ risk perceptions and predicting their adaptive responses. This assumption persists in part because there is surprisingly little empirical evidence either way, although case studies suggest that there may be important differences. Here, we use a national survey of South Africa’s commercial grain farmers (n = 389)—similar to their peers in higher-income countries (e.g., North America, Europe, Australia), but without subsidies—to show that they treat weather and climate change risks quite differently. We find that their perceptions of climate change risks are distinct from and, in many regards, oppositional to their perceptions of weather risks. While there seems to be a temporal element to this distinction (i.e., differing concern for short-term vs long-term risks), there are other differences that are better understood in terms of normalcy (i.e., normal vs abnormal relative to historical climate) and permanency (i.e., temporary vs permanent changes). We also find an interaction effect of education and political identity on concern for climate change that is at odds with the well-publicized cultural cognition thesis based on surveys of the American public. Overall, studies that use weather and climate variability as unqualified proxies for climate change are likely to mislead researchers and policymakers about how farmers perceive, interpret, and respond to climate change stimuli.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".