There are two kinds of uncertainties in life.

For the first type, you have information sources like weather forecasts, drug-package inserts, and mutual-fund brochures, all of which provide descriptions of possible outcomes (rainy or sunny, various complications, potential profits) and probabilities. For the second, you have no summary descriptions of possible outcomes or their likelihoods, such as whether to go out on a date, when to back up your files in computer, or if cross a busy street or not. For the later events, you have to rely on your own encounters with different occasions, and make decisions from experience.

Hertwig, Weber & Erev (2004) and a lot of other studies found that decisions from experience and decisions from descriptions can lead to dramatically different choice behaviors. In addition, the event you encounter just recently takes larger weight than events happened long time ago. Therefore, people live at different geographic locations might have dramatically different beliefs about climate change, despite that they read the same report about climate change: those who have gone through a warm winter hold different beliefs compared to those who have gone through winter with snowstorms.

How those beliefs from personal experience are integrated within groups still stay unknown. We have to admit that debiasing group beliefs on climate change is a challenging task for researchers to work on.