Warm winters enhance wellbeing: Insights into Global Warming’s Human Impact from Survey Data on Weather Satisfaction: Multivariate Estimates, USA 2016-2021, N=10,000+

While the scientific analysis of the causes of climate change is based on a vast body of mostly rigorous, peer-reviewed research (NCAS 2023), the evaluation of the human consequences is not. Strangely, little systematic empirical evidence has been gathered or presented on how humans actually evaluate their climates and hence on their likely subjective experience of global warming. Instead, people’s reactions are more often assumed than measured. The literature, as well as the public debate, is rife with empirically poorly-grounded assertions, often plausible but rarely based on rigorous empirical measurement and peer-reviewed research. To help ameliorate this deficit, this paper takes the approach of “reading history sideways”: Comparing individual subjective wellbeing across a wide range of temperatures (net of many potentially confounding variables). Cross-sectional survey data using explicit questions about satisfaction with winter weather and satisfaction with summer weather across the entire US provide the key outcomes. Multivariate analysis of US national surveys combined with standard NOAA data on actual month-by-month temperatures at each location over many years reveal the climate effects from which we can project global warming's effects. The results show that the impact of temperature is real but small. The changes to be expected from the widely discussed 1.5° to 2° Celsius of global warming are both familiar and small, equivalent to moving from Massachusetts to New Jersey, or Virginia to North Carolina, or Arizona to Florida, or, more generally, 180 miles south. All else equal, this amount of warming is projected to increase Americans' satisfaction with winter weather, especially in the north, but somewhat to decrease satisfaction with summer in both north and south. On balance, most Americans would benefit from 4 to 6 degrees Fahrenheit of global warming, with gains from warming in the winter outweighing losses from warming in the summer. Provided that the connection between temperature and wellbeing that we find for the US holds in other countries, too, our results suggest that that for most people in Canada, Northern Europe, Russia, and other cold nations, global warming in the range anticipated over the next century will enhance well being. For people living in the equatorial zones, by contrast, global warming will reduce subjective wellbeing. Note that these results apply only to the temperature dimension of climate change, the subjective impacts of other aspects have yet to be investigated.

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