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Previous research has shown that we believe more in the reality of climate change when we experience warmer-than-usual temperatures. This reflects a psychological process in which easily accessible information from personal weather experiences is used as a heuristic to form climate opinions. This paper replicates and extends upon a research design and results of Egan and Mullin to provide the first systematic European study of the Local Warming Effect. Based on data from 12 European countries, the analysis shows that when objective temperatures increase by two standard deviations (5 °C) relative to normal temperatures, climate opinions are strengthened by around 0.5–1.0 percentage points – comparable to the effect of a full step to the left on a 0–10 political ideology scale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The idea of using large-scale information to predict local climate variability is widely exploited in climate change impact studies as an alternative to computationally expensive high-resolution models. This approach implies the hypothesis that the statistical relationship between large-scale climate states and local variables defined for the present-day climate remains valid in the altered climate. In this paper, the concept of weather regimes is used to deduce a relationship between large-scale circulation and European winter temperature. The change in temperature with increased greenhouse gases is, however, not homogeneous among the individual regimes. As a result, the impact of the weather regimes on local temperature changes varies in the future, limiting its usefulness for refining temperature changes to the small scale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]