Climate change public opinion is frequently drawn upon to support claims that the public is or is not in favour of pressing forward with climate action. However, what ‘climate change public opinion’ is tends to be vaguely defined. Current understandings cover a variety of facets that are not always complementary, and can signal apparently contradictory patterns if used interchangeably. A cohesive, up-to-date framework for how these fit together and the measurement choices that face researchers is however absent. This is problematic as it can result in conceptual stretching whereby, in the words of Sartori, ‘we are left to swim in a sea of empirical and theoretical messiness’. Substantively, it also means that political actors of different views can cherry-pick particular surveys to back claims that publics demand action or are not ready for it.

This paper thus reviews climate change questions fielded in public opinion surveys, classifies them into meaningful categories, and - drawing from the existing literature - discusses the different elements they evoke and their implications for both research and policy. Analytically, it examines trends in the popularity of climate questions capturing different underlying dimensions, highlights where particular types of climate questions have been under-fielded, and points to research gaps where the intersections between different elements should be focused on over the coming years.