Searching for the Determinants of Climate Change Interest

Table 1

Summary of statistics.

Variable	Mean (Std Dev)	Min	Max
GSI weather	40.66 (10.0)	19.15	67.03
GSI climate change	8.61 (10.0)	0	49.92
GSI global warming	16.21 (10.0)	0	51.44
Income (1000$)	35.89 (5.76)	20.47	59.87
Population (1000 persons)	1479 (2370)	7.69	20852
CO2 emissions (tons per capita)	7.12 (7.28)	1.93	72.30
Democrat vote share	47.45 (10.47)	23.17	75.34
Percent of college graduate	17.75 (4.96)	8.23	32.37
Percent of Whites	79.40 (12.43)	34.36	97.57
Percent of those over 65 years old	14.10 (2.49)	7.93	25.11
Percent of males	49.40 (0.79)	47.64	52.17
Coast (1 = yes)	0.20 (0.40)	0	1
Average annual temperature (Celsius)	16.16 (5.86)	4.66	41.30
Annual total precipitation (inches)	52.31 (19.17)	4.12	99.79
Annual total snow (inches)	20.75 (23.57)	0	113.42

Notes. GSI is gathered from Google Trends and is derived from raw Google search data generated by individuals across the United States from January 2008 to November 2012. We normalized the standard deviation to 10 to allow the spread of the distribution of a variable with a large mean and correspondingly large standard deviation to be compared more appropriately with the spread of the distribution of another variable with smaller mean and correspondingly smaller standard deviation. Average income data comes from The Bureau of Economic Analysis. Carbon dioxide emissions were gathered from the Vulcan fossil fuel CO₂ emissions data, produced at Arizona State University in conjunction with collaborators at Colorado State University and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The Democrat data is from Dave Liep’s Atlas of US Presidential Elections 2008. College graduate data is from the 5-year American Community Survey from 2006 until 2010. The climate variables were gathered daily from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Global Historical Climatology Network.