Jennifer R Marlon

Yale University | YU · School of the Environment

As climate change impacts increase, communicators must engage as many audiences as possible in climate action. One potentially underrated audience is video gamers. Two-thirds of Americans play video games, and video games are a potentially effective climate change communication tool. However, little research has examined whether video gamers have u...

As climate change impacts increase, communicators must engage as many audiences as possible in climate action. One potentially underrated audience is video gamers. Two-thirds of Americans play video games, and video games are a potentially effective climate change communication tool. However, little research has examined whether video gamers have u...

A series of publications purport to provide evidence that the Earth was subjected to an extraterrestrial event or events at ~12.9 ka creating an environmental cataclysm and the onset of the Younger Dryas stadial. The varied and sometime conflicting speculations in those publications have become known collectively as the “Younger Dryas Impact Hypoth...

The segmentation analysis, based on a nationally representative survey of 4,619 Indian adults, identified four unique global warming audiences in India: The Alarmed, the Concerned, the Cautious, and the Disengaged. The majority of the Indian population are Alarmed (54%) – the group most aware and convinced of the reality and danger of global warmin...

Supplemental materials for "Measuring Americans' Support for Adapting to 'Climate Change' or 'Extreme Weather'"

Climate communicators can use the terms ‘climate change’ or ‘extreme weather’ to describe climate change adaptation strategies. However, the terms might differentially affect individuals’ support for those strategies. We examined Americans’ (N = 1,558) endorsement of climate change adaptation behaviors and policies based on whether they were descri...

Strategic communication requires the identification and understanding of target audiences for tailored communication. The Global Warming’s Six Americas analysis segments the U.S. public into six distinct, but internally consistent audiences, who each respond differently to the issue of climate change. The segments include the Alarmed, Concerned, Ca...

Extinctions and grassland fire Grassland herbivores are known to play a role in limiting wildfires by consuming potentially flammable material. Karp et al . present evidence that that herbivore-fire interactions affected fire on a global scale in the past. They compared the severity of late Quaternary continent-level megaherbivore extinctions with...

Climate communicators can use the terms climate change or extreme weather to describe climate change adaptation strategies. However, the terms might differentially affect individuals’ support for those strategies. We examined Americans’ (N = 1,558) endorsement of climate change adaptation behaviors and policies based on whether they were described...

Using a multi-sector model of human and natural systems, we find that the nationwide cost from state-varying climate policy in the United States is only one-tenth higher than that of nationally uniform policy. The benefits of state-led action — leadership, experimentation and the practical reality that states implement policy more reliably than the...

Traditionally, analysis of the costs of cutting greenhouse gas emissions has assumed that governments would implement idealized, optimal policies such as uniform economy-wide carbon taxes. Yet actual policies in the real world, especially in large federal governments, are often highly heterogeneous and vary in political support and administrative c...

Public perceptions of climate change in the United States are deeply rooted in cultural values and political identities. Yet, as the public experiences extreme weather and other climate change-related impacts, their perceptions of the issue may shift. Here, we explore whether, when, and where local climate trends have already influenced perceived e...

Wildfires are an integral part of most terrestrial ecosystems. Paleofire records composed of charcoal, soot, and other combustion products deposited in lake and marine sediments, soils, and ice provide a record of the varying importance of fire over time on every continent. This study reviews paleofire research to identify lessons about the nature...

On April 3 2020, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommended that all Americans wear face masks to prevent the spread of COVID-19. The announcement came during the fielding of a large, nationally-representative survey (N = 3,933) of Americans' COVID-19-related knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors, providing an opportunity t...

In this working paper, we used a large national survey of American adults (N = 3,933) to estimate the effect of perceived social norms among friends and family (i.e., how often friends and family perform preventive behaviors, and whether they think it is important for the respondent to do so) on people’s own COVID-19 preventive behaviors. We found...

Drawing on a scientific national survey (N = 3,933; including 3,188 registered voters), this report describes Americans’ risk perceptions and emotional responses to COVID-19 to inform the public health community, policymakers, and the public.

On April 3 2020, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommended that all Americans wear face masks to prevent the spread of COVID-19. The announcement came during the fielding of a large, nationally-representative survey (N = 3,933) of Americans’ COVID-19-related knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors, providing an opportunity t...

Drawing on a scientific national survey (N = 3,933; including 3,188 registered voters), this report describes Americans’ coronavirus knowledge, attitudes, vulnerabilities, protective behaviors, and communication needs in an effort to inform the public health community, policymakers, and the public.

Do campaign contributions from oil and gas companies influence legislators to vote against the environment, or do these companies invest in legislators that have a proven anti environmental voting record? Using 28 y of campaign contribution data, we find that evidence consistently supports the investment hypothesis: The more a given member of Congr...

Significance We reconstructed a unique record of soot variations from a classic Chinese loess section that reflects regional-to-continental scale high-intensity fires in central Asia over the entire Quaternary. This study shows cyclicity of wildfire over glacial–interglacial intervals. High-intensity wildfires were more common and dust loads were h...

As hurricanes intensify and more people are at risk, there is a clear need to understand the evacuation behavior of coastal residents. Of particular relevance is the role of past experience in evacuation decisions, about which evidence is mixed. In the current study, we use the Meta-Cognitive Model (MCM) to show that expectations of future hurrican...

Increasingly, researchers studying public beliefs about global warming have turned to the question of whether individuals have begun to perceive changes to their local climate conditions and to what extent they attribute these changes to the phenomenon of global warming. Perceptions of particular types of extreme events, i.e. extreme heat and droug...

As climate change intensifies, global publics will experience more unusual weather and extreme weather events. How will individual experiences with these weather trends shape climate change beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors? In this article, we review 73 papers that have studied the relationship between climate change experiences and public opinion...

The severe threats posed by anthropogenic climate change make hope and a sense of efficacy key ingredients in effective climate communication. Yet little is known about what makes individuals hopeful–or in contrast, doubtful–that humanity can reduce the problem, or how hope relates to activism. This study uses mixed-methods with two national survey...

Extreme heat is the leading weather-related cause of death in the United States. Many individuals, however, fail to perceive this risk, which will be exacerbated by global warming. Given that awareness of one’s physical and social vulnerability is a critical precursor to preparedness for extreme weather events, understanding Americans’ perceptions...

The Earth has experienced large changes in global and regional climates over the past one million years. Understanding processes and feedbacks that control those past environmental changes is of great interest for better understanding the nature, direction and magnitude of current climate change, its effect on life, and on the physical, biological...

The risks associated with extreme heat are increasing as heat waves become more frequent and severe across larger areas. As people begin to experience heat waves more often and in more places, how will individuals respond? Measuring experience with heat simply as exposure to extreme temperatures may not fully capture how people subjectively experie...

Context Predicting ecosystem resilience is a challenge, especially as climate change alters disturbance regimes and conditions for recovery. Recent research has highlighted the importance of spatially-explicit disturbance and resilience processes to long-term ecosystem dynamics. “Neoecological” approaches characterize resilience mechanisms at relat...

Researchers in different social science disciplines have successfully used Facebook to recruit subjects for their studies. However, such convenience samples are not generally representative of the population. We developed and validated a new quota sampling method to recruit respondents using Facebook advertisements. Additionally, we published an R...

Audience segmentation has long been used in marketing, public health, and communication, and is now becoming an important tool in the environmental domain as well. Global Warming's Six Americas is a well-established segmentation of Americans based on their climate change beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors. The original Six Americas model requires a...

Vulnerability and resilience to extreme weather hazards are a function of diverse physical, social, and psychological factors. Previous research has focused on individual factors that influence public perceptions of hazards, such as politics, ideology, and cultural worldviews, as well as on socioeconomic and demographic factors that affect geograph...

Grasslands are globally extensive; they exist in many different climates, at high and low elevations, on nutrient-rich and -poor soils. Grassland distributions today are closely linked to human activities, herbivores, and fire, but many have been converted to urban areas, forests, or agriculture fields. Roughly 80% of fires globally occur in grassl...

In the version of this Review Article originally published, ref. 10 was mistakenly cited instead of ref. 107 at the end of the sentence: “This complexity of residual ice cover makes it likely that HTM warming was regional, rather than global, and its peak warmth thus had different timing in different locations.” In addition, for ref. 108, Scientifi...

Over the past 3.5 million years, there have been several intervals when climate conditions were warmer than during the pre-industrial Holocene. Although past intervals of warming were forced differently than future anthropogenic change, such periods can provide insights into potential future climate impacts and ecosystem feedbacks, especially over...

Social science scholars routinely evaluate the efficacy of diverse climate frames using local convenience or nationally representative samples1–5. For example, previous research has focused on communicating the scientific consensus on climate change, which has been identified as a ‘gateway’ cognition to other key beliefs about the issue6–9. Importa...

Social science scholars routinely evaluate the efficacy of diverse climate frames using local convenience or nationally representative samples. For example, previous research has focused on communicating the scientific consensus on climate change, which has been identified as a ‘gateway’ cognition to other key beliefs about the issue6,7,8,9. Import...

Extreme heat is the leading weather-related cause of death in the U.S., a threat that is exacerbated by global warming. Yet many individuals fail to perceive extreme heat as a serious risk. Thus, understanding Americans’ perceptions of heat risk and how such perceptions vary geographically and across different populations is a critical precursor to...

The referenced publication included a methodological error that affects a portion of the reported results for registered Democrats by about 1 percentage point on average.

Anthropogenic climate change is increasing the frequency and severity of extreme weather events (e.g. flooding, heat waves, and wildfires). As a result, it is often reasoned that as more individuals experience unusual weather patterns that are consistent with changing climate conditions, the more their concern about global warming will increase, an...

Even as US partisan polarization shapes climate and energy attitudes, substantial heterogeneity in climate opinions still exists among both Republicans and Democrats. To date, our understanding of this partisan heterogeneity has been limited to analysis of national- or, less commonly, state-level opinion poll subsamples. However, the dynamics of po...

Volcanic eruptions provide tests of human and natural system sensitivity to abrupt shocks because their repeated occurrence allows the identification of systematic relationships in the presence of random variability. Here we show a suppression of Nile summer flooding via the radiative and dynamical impacts of explosive volcanism on the African mons...

Supplementary Information for the article: Volcanic suppression of Nile summer flooding triggers revolt and constrains interstate conflict in ancient Egypt. Nature Communications, 8, Article number: 900 (2017) doi:10.1038/s41467-017-00957-y. See https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs41467-017-00957-y/MediaObjects/41467_2017_957_M...

Many ecosystem processes that influence Earth system feedbacks – vegetation growth, water and nutrient cycling, disturbance regimes – are strongly influenced by multidecadal- to millennial-scale climate variations that cannot be directly observed. Paleoclimate records provide information about these variations, forming the basis of our understandin...

Fires have influenced atmospheric composition and climate since the rise of vascular plants, and satellite data have shown the overall global extent of fires. Our knowledge of historic fire emissions has progressively improved over the past decades due mostly to the development of new proxies and the improvement of fire models. Currently, there is...

Progresses in reconstructing Earth's history of biomass burning has motivated the development of a modern charcoal dataset covering the last decades through a community-based initiative called the Global Modern Charcoal Dataset (GMCD). As the frequency, intensity and spatial scale of fires are predicted to increase regionally and globally in conjun...

Fires have influenced atmospheric composition and climate since the rise of vascular plants, and satellite data has shown the overall global extent of fires. Our knowledge of historic fire emissions has progressively improved over the past decades due mostly to the development of new proxies and the improvement of fire models. Currently there is a...

Lake sediment charcoal records are used in paleoecological analyses to reconstruct fire history including the identification of past wildland fires. One challenge of applying sediment charcoal records to infer fire history is the separation of charcoal associated with local fire occurrence and charcoal originating from regional fire activity. Despi...

Many ecosystem processes that influence Earth system feedbacks, including vegetation growth, water and nutrient cycling, and disturbance regimes, are strongly influenced by multi-decadal to millennial-scale variations in climate that cannot be captured by instrumental climate observations. Paleoclimate information is therefore essential for underst...

While climate scientists have developed high resolution data sets on the distribution of climate risks, we still lack comparable data on the local distribution of public climate change opinions. This paper provides the first effort to estimate local climate and energy opinion variability outside the United States. Using a multi-level regression and...

The S1 File provides full details of all the underlying survey questions used in this study, additional cross-validation data and additional results. (PDF)

The location, timing, spatial extent, and frequency of wildfires are changing rapidly in many parts of the world, producing substantial impacts on ecosystems, people, and potentially climate. Paleofire records based on charcoal accumulation in sediments enable modern changes in biomass burning to be considered in their long-term context. Paleofire...

Abstract: The current fires raging across Indonesia are emitting more carbon than the annual fossil fuel emissions of Germany or Japan, and the fires are still consuming vast tracts of rainforest and peatlands. The National Interagency Fire Center (www.nifc.gov) notes that 2015 is one of the worst fire years on record in the U.S., where more than 9...

The current fires raging across Indonesia are emitting more carbon than the annual fossil fuel emissions of Germany or Japan, and the fires are still consuming vast tracts of rainforest and peatlands. The National Interagency Fire Center (www.nifc.gov) notes that 2015 is one worst fire years on record in the U.S., where more than 9 million acres bu...

Kennett et al. (1) apply a Bayesian chronological model in an effort to support the hypothesis of Firestone et al. (2) that “a major cosmic episode of multiple airbursts/impacts occurred at 12,800 ± 300 [B.P.].” Bayesian modeling is a powerful tool because it is intended to incorporate and account for all available evidence. However, Kennett et al....

The location, timing, spatial extent, and frequency of wildfires are changing rapidly in many parts of the world, producing substantial impacts on ecosystems, people, and potentially climate. Paleofire records based on charcoal accumulation in sediments enable modern changes in biomass burning to be considered in their long-term context. Paleofire...

NOAA/Sea Grant Coastal Storm Awareness Program (CSAP ) Final Workshop; Newark, New Jersey, 26–27 May 2015

Wildfire plays an important role in ecosystems of the Pacific Northwest, but past relationships among fire, climate, and human actions remain unclear. A multiscale analysis of thirty-four macroscopic charcoal records from a variety of biophysical settings was conducted to reconstruct fire activity for the Pacific Northwest (PNW) during the past 12,...

The timing of initiation of human impacts on the global climate system is actively debated. Anthropogenic effects on the global climate system are evident since the Industrial Revolution, but humans may have altered biomass burning, and hence the climate system, for millennia. We use the specific biomarker levoglucosan to produce the first high-tem...