Concern about climate? Do you wear a coat today?

Opinions about climate may be as fickle as the winds.

A simple shift of temperature and Columbia University social scientists found that opinions about future climate change according to changed. In polls of 1,200 people in the United States and Australia were many who thought, was the day more concerned about global warming unusually warm, as they were at days, which meant they were unusually cold.

"I'm not sure I would say that people are manipulated by the weather," said lead author ye Li in a press release from Columbia. "But for some percentage of people, it is certainly she pushed around."

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Published in the journal psychological science, is the analysis of part of a broader effort by social scientists to understand how people decide on environmental issues. The work can help, explain, the discrepancy between fluctuating doubts among the public and a broad consensus of climate experts who say changes are underway and human industrial emissions are an important factor.

While most climate experts are often public perception of the issue the question of objective data and chemical and dynamic processes in the atmosphere, oceans and other elements of the long-term climate system see politicized and influenced by peer groups.

The researchers made all the predictable Verzerrungen--Democrats rather than Republicans believe in global warming, young people and women rather than men and older people. With all these factors into account, "the researchers found that perceived temperatures had nearly two-thirds the power as political conviction and six times the power than sex, someone one way or other press" said the press release.

This trick of the mind is known to psychologists as "attribute substitution," a process, according to Li, "in the easily accessible judgment (the current day local temperature) instead of a more complex and difficult accessible one (global temperature trends) is used."

Image: Waterfront dining at Circular Quay, overlooking the port of Sydney, new South Wales, Australia. Credit: Andrew Watson/JAI/Corbis.

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