If climate change impact can be observed in nature, has that had any effect on rural, i.e. farming community, perception of the scientific consensus?

Question

Simply put, rural US districts tend to be more conservative so tend to vote Republican. And the rejection of climate change theory has been a bedrock of Republican politics for years by now.

If one assumes* that we are seeing early signs of persistent changes in weather pattern, then farmers, who professionally have been very attuned to long term weather conditions to be successful, ought to be aware of them.

Some examples of persistent weather patterns:

• California has had multiple years of drought.
• BC has had massive forest fires for 3 out of the last 4 years.
• Extremely deadly forest fires in Portugal and Greece.
• Global land and ocean temperature anomalies
• the Mountain Pine Beetle decimated pines in the BC Interior Plateau. This happened because we didn't enough -35C winter temperatures, which are the only real natural constraint to this pest.

Now, clearly, some of these can be attributed to modern forest management practices. But farmers are precisely the kind of people who analyze weather trends for a living. So I would expect at least some of them to be worrying about long term temperature and precipitation trends.

Has there been any grassroots movement among the US farming and ranching communities (specifically, on the Republican side of things), questioning the wisdom of continued rejection of the IPCC findings? Even if they retain conservative views on other issues such as crime, abortion and immigration.

* If you disagree with climate change or any signs of it happening at all, that's fine and you can put that as an answer. That's self-explanatory as to why farmers wouldn't worry then.

Answer 1

Many farmers do seem to recognise that there are climate-related effects (even if they don't name it as such),

however, farmers don't always agree climate change is a result of human actions. The reason I think that's an important distinction is because if we're not the cause (link to myth) and it's not something we have influence on, then we don't need to take action. The reasoning is, that if we cannot do anything to change it, then it's not worth trying and putting money into.

I will quote some research to illustrate my point.

The first few lines of the conclusion of an article titled: Skeptical but Adapting: What Midwestern Farmers Say about Climate Change in the American Meteorological Society:

The farmers in our focus groups expressed skepticism about global, human-induced climate change and yet articulated climate change impacts they have experienced on their farms. They struggled to separate climate change adaptation actions from all the management decisions they make in an ever-shifting agricultural world. That farmers struggle to define the term, referring instead to “management decisions,” reflects this disconnect.

Another more accessible article by Scientific American:

In 2011, Arbuckle and his colleagues used the annual Iowa Farm and Rural Life Poll to survey over 1,200 farmers in the state about their views on the subject.

Only 10.4 percent of participants agreed with the statement, "climate change is occurring and it is caused mostly by human activities."

The highest number of respondents, 35 percent, said climate change was caused about equally by natural changes in the environment and human causes. Just under a quarter (23 percent) said climate change was mostly caused by natural changes, 27 percent said there was not sufficient evidence, and 4.6 percent said climate change was not occurring.

Answer 2

Whereas one would expect farmers to notice changes in climate locally, it doesn’t follow that they are well placed to judge whether there is a broader pattern and whether the change is due to natural processes or due to anthropogenic change.

As rural areas tend to be conservative, one would expect, if all things are equal, that farmers would tend to favour initiatives to keep or conserve the climate as is rather than those promoting more climate change. However, all things are not equal: the climate change debate is heavily politicised as one would expect given that the fossil fuel industry has had several centuries to embed itself within the industrial fabric of a nation and has huge investments and industries at stake.

Given the nature of the debate, the proper forum for understanding what’s at stake, disentangling misinformation from information is the legislature. One instance of this is the Texas legislature which at the beginning of the millennium mandated that utilities get part of their energy from renewable sources, a mandate that was promoted by a tax credit. This has led to 18% of the states energy being sourced from renewables.

This remarkable achievement in only two decades has been so successful that it has attracted the attention of fossil fuel lobbyists. For example, the Texas Public Policy Foundation who employ around 20 lobbyists to target renewable energy subsidies.