A poll worker collects mail in ballots in New Jersey.Gary Hershorn/Getty Images/Grist This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration . Among those concerned about the climate, it’s become something of a self-evident truth that as people suffer more severe and more frequent extreme weather and grapple with global warming’s impact on their daily lives, they’ll come to understand the problem at a visceral level. As a result, they’ll be eager for action. In other words, many climate activists believe that even if advocates and academics can’t sway the hardened opinions of the dismissive, extreme weather can wake anyone up. The data disagrees. Over the last seven years, as the effects of climate change have begun to envelop the world in smoke and storm, natural disasters have leaped to the front of mind for voters when they contemplate the most important reasons to take climate action. Those concerns, however, aren’t shared evenly across the political spectrum. Preventing extreme weather ranked among the top three reasons to address the crisis among 37 percent of voters surveyed this year, according to an analysis by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. That’s up from 28 percent seven years ago. For Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale program, this shift reflects the fact that, while many Americans regard climate change with a certain psychological distance, the increasingly shared experience of smoke-filled skies, life-threatening heat, and earth-cracking droughts means “climate change is no longer distant in time and space,” Leiserowitz says, “it’s right here, right now.” “Climate change is no longer distant in time and space, it’s right here, right now.” Mainstream media outlets are making that increasingly clear for their audiences, thanks in large part to the nascent field of attribution science […]