Definition
The Climate Change Belief Score predicts a person's likelihood to believe that climate change will lead to catastrophes if we don't stop it. Individuals with higher scores indicate greater likelihood of supporting the position that climate change will cause catastrophic consequences without action.
Technical Details
The model was built from the following polling question:
Climate change will lead to catastrophes if we don't stop it.
- Strongly Disagree
- Disagree
- Neither Agree nor Disagree
- Agree
- Strongly Agree
Respondents who answered “Strongly Agree” or “Agree” are labeled as climate change believers. Respondents who answered “Disagree”, “Strongly Disagree”, or “Neither Agree nor Disagree” are labeled as not climate change believers.
The Climate Change Belief Score was trained on polling data from the Winter 2025 Murmuration poll. We collected 8,002 responses online from registered voters in December 2025. The survey used stratified random sampling to ensure national representativeness across age, race, gender, partisanship, education and geography.
The model was trained using gradient-boosted decision trees. Model features were drawn from the Atlas by Murmuration dataset, which includes demographic (age, race, gender, etc.), commercial, geographic, and vote history information for all registered voters nationally.
Scores range from 0-100, where higher scores indicate greater likelihood that a voter believes in climate change. The score represents the model's predicted probability (scaled to 0-100) that an individual believes climate change will lead to catastrophes if it is not stopped.
We validated the model's accuracy using a held-out set of 1,543 polling respondents (20% of the original survey sample) whose data was not used during model development. Among individuals with scores in the top 20% of the Climate Change Belief Score, 92% are actual climate change believers—making them 51% more likely to believe in climate change than the average voter.
Use Cases
- Persuasion and Education Campaigns: The Climate Change Belief Score helps campaigns identify moderate and persuadable voters who may recognize climate threats but need activation on this issue. Partners can use mid-range Climate Change Belief Scores to find swing voters with latent climate concerns, moderate voters who may be open to climate messaging framed around economic impacts or national security, and independents who recognize environmental changes but need stronger urgency messaging. This score can be layered with Partisan Scores to identify cross-pressured voters who hold climate views that don't align with their typical partisan behavior. Persuasion campaigns benefit from targeting voters who show some recognition of climate risks but may need additional information about local climate impacts, extreme weather connections, or clean energy economic opportunities to strengthen their belief in catastrophic risk.
- Base Mobilization and GOTV: Campaigns can use high Climate Change Belief Scores to identify strong believers in climate catastrophe for turnout and volunteer recruitment efforts. These high scoring individuals represent the core base on climate issues and are prime candidates for get-out-the-vote programs. Partners should consider layering Climate Change Belief with turnout propensity scores to prioritize likely voters, and grassroots engagement/activism to recruit likely donors or activists. This approach ensures that voter contact resources are directed toward supporters who both recognize catastrophic climate risk and are likely to participate in electoral activities.
- Coalition Building and Community Engagement: The Climate Change Belief Score enables partners to find voters who believe in climate catastrophe but may not be reached through traditional progressive outreach channels. This score is particularly valuable when layered with demographic data and geographic targeting in communities experiencing direct climate impacts such as coastal flooding, wildfire risk, agricultural disruption, or extreme heat. Environmental organizations, youth climate groups, and community resilience initiatives can use this score to identify supporters in their networks and surrounding communities. Community groups can use the Climate Change Belief Score to prioritize outreach in areas where residents directly experience climate change effects, ensuring that organizing efforts focus on those most likely to be responsive to climate urgency messaging.
Targeting Table
The table below shows the score values associated with each decile to help you more easily target using the Climate Change Belief Score nationally. Note: these score cutoffs may be different in your local districts.
| To target the top... | Set the minimum score value as... |
| 10% | 90 |
| 20% | 88 |
| 30% | 84 |
| 40% | 71 |
| 50% | 50 |
| 60% | 33 |
| 70% | 19 |
| 80% | 12 |
| 90% | 10 |
| 100% | 0 |