👋 Hey, everybody. This week, we’re unpacking a recent study from Gallup about how experiencing extreme weather affects people’s attitudes about the future. The data offers a rare look at something that’s difficult to quantify, and it may have implications for how we think about climate messaging. 

We’ve also got news for you about trains, tires, and sea stars.

This post originally appeared in Grist’s weekly solutions newsletter, Looking Forward. Not on our list yet? Subscribe here to get it in your inbox every Friday.

Does extreme weather spur climate action? Not on its own.

Residents inspect the damage amid debris and destroyed homes a day after a tornado ripped through Menasha, Wisconsin, on July 28, 2026.

Octavio Jones / AFP via Getty Images

In the past 12 months, has your town or city been affected by damage from extreme weather? Personally, I would say yes. In just the past several weeks, Seattle, where I live, has been impacted by heat waves and smoke from horrific wildfires in nearby Spokane. In the midst of this summer of extremes, I’m guessing, wherever you live, you very likely can say the same. 

In a survey published by the polling firm Gallup and the Walton Family Foundation this week, 38 percent of Americans agreed — more than ever before. And in the study’s “east south central” region, an area that has been hit hard by hurricanes and floods, the number was well over 50 percent. That finding is significant in and of itself. But the same poll also found that people who reported experiencing damage from extreme weather were less likely to feel a sense of agency over their lives, compared with those who said they hadn’t been affected — and more likely to feel “pushed by circumstances beyond [their] control.”

Those results make some amount of sense. If your life has been upended by a disaster, it would undoubtedly be difficult to regain a sense of stability and control. But they also complicate a picture that the climate movement has been painting for a long time: that once enough people see the effects of climate change on their doorsteps, they’ll finally come around to the severity of the crisis and be motivated to do something about it. 

That’s something I think a lot of us feel intuitively — experiencing more and more disasters must surely shake people into a sense of understanding and urgency. When it gets bad enough, people will demand solutions.

We’ve even suggested the same in this very newsletter. Recently, we looked at climate impacts on the World Cup stage and pondered whether that visibility could potentially lead to pushes for action. 

The truth is that “there’s very little good quantitative evidence about this in any direction,” said my colleague Jake Bittle, who explored the survey results and their implications in a story for Grist this week. Jake has reported on disasters for a long time, always with an interest in how they affect people’s inner lives. 

In his story, Jake touched on some of the conflicting outcomes in research done to date. Some show extreme weather might impact attitudes about climate change, some show it doesn’t. Some indicate experiencing a disaster increases support for action, others that it decreases trust in government.

“When I’ve talked to people who’ve experienced disasters — I’ll routinely check in with people I know who I met after hurricanes — I’ve noticed that their views will change over time. But not in such a way that even I could be systematic about it,” Jake said. 

So, why doesn’t that clear causal relationship come through? Why isn’t extreme weather galvanizing people en masse? 

For a question like that, I had to go to Grist’s culture and behavioral science maven, Kate Yoder.  

“There’s sort of this belief that if people understand how bad climate change is, if we can educate them about the scale of the problem, then they’ll realize it’s a huge problem and want to do something about it,” Kate said. “From talking to especially people in neuroscience, that isn’t generally how that sort of thing works. Often, it’s people’s actions driving their beliefs instead of the other way around.” 

So, for instance, if a person goes to a climate protest one day with a friend, they may be more likely to identify as someone who goes to climate protests, and that identity might motivate them to engage in other forms of action in the future. 

That initial spark often comes from social cues, Kate said. What we see the people around us doing and valuing is, generally speaking, a much more powerful influence on our worldviews and behavior than any other external force. 

“The central problem isn’t that people don’t care about climate change,” Kate said. “If you look at surveys, most people do care about climate change and they do want action and they might not be sure of what that looks like.”

She pointed out that the upset caused by extreme weather disasters, and the attention and support they often bring, does create a critical pivot point for change — and how people’s views shift in that moment might depend on what they see happening around them.

Jake agreed. His piece also included a counterexample to the story told by the Gallup data. Five years ago, the destruction of the Marshall Fire in Boulder, Colorado, motivated residents to form a group that successfully lobbied to get several bills passed, aimed at improving recovery from future fires. 

“What’s really powerful is that many of the reforms did not apply to the people who were currently recovering from the fire,” Jake noted. “They took effect for all future disasters.”

If it’s true that people who experience disasters are more likely to feel like the future is out of their control, that is a concerning trend worth paying attention to, Jake said. But, the lesson of the Marshall Fire is that that isn’t inevitable. 

“Maybe it’s better to see disasters not as an opportunity to make people understand that global warming is coming, but as an opportunity to spur civic engagement,” Jake said. That would depend in part on community organizers and civil servants engaging people, whether it’s in the aftermath of an acute disaster or in the face of more routine severe weather, to be a part of planning for what comes next. “What does it take to get people to have a real conversation about what they need and what their community should look like?”

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Next week, we’ll be back with another column in our Ask a Climate Therapist series — which actually touches on some similar themes of what motivates people to act or stay engaged with climate work, even when they feel so much is out of their control. 

Do you have any questions you’d like to see our therapist, Leslie Davenport, address in a future column? Submit them here. 

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In other news

And finally, looking forward to …

… day-to-day climate action, done in community. This drabble comes from Looking Forward reader Jenifer Seal-Cramer.     

🚲🚲🚲

“Doesn’t the water taste crisp this morning?” I say to my husband. “I love the spring!” 

With my cup of tea, I walk out to our shared Living Machine and see the fresh blooms on the aquatic plants. My neighbor, Shellita, says hello as she selects the herbs for the soup she’ll be preparing.

I saddle up in the Pedal Circle. Claude and Hakim are already spinning. Claude’s practicing his fiddle and making up funny songs while cranking along. 

I look forward to finishing repair of the hydrochopper today and beginning Stewart Brand’s classic Maintenance of Everything with the students.

— a drabble by Jenifer Seal-Cramer

🚲🚲🚲

A drabble is a 100-word piece of fiction — in this case, offering a tiny glimpse of what a clean, green, just future might look like. Want to try writing your own (and see it featured in a future newsletter)? We would love to hear from you! Please send us your visions for our climate future, in drabble form, at [email protected]

👋 See you next week!