This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Amid a summer of dangerous heat, drought, and floods, a majority of Americans are connecting increasingly severe weather to the climate crisis, new polling shows, despite efforts by Donald Trump to dismiss global heating as a “con job” and a “hoax.”

It’s a sign that attempts to suppress and polarize climate concerns may not be seeing full success, said Grace Adcox, senior climate strategist at Data for Progress.

“We started with the question of ‘are extreme weather events increasing,’ because we thought [that] if we can find consensus on that, that can be an entry point to being able to have a more bipartisan conversation about climate and climate intervention,” she said.

About 61 percent of likely American voters believe extreme weather events have become more frequent over the past five years, the survey from the progressive polling firm Data for Progress, shared exclusively with the Guardian, found. That includes 72 percent of Democrats, 63 percent of Independents, and nearly half—46 percent—of all Republicans.

Sheldon Whitehouse, the Rhode Island senator who has long criticized Democrats for quieting their talk of global warming—or “climate-hushing”—said the new data “adds to the mountain of evidence that the public is way ahead of the politicians on the dire consequences of climate change.”

“Extreme heat happens to have the biggest footprint in the American context compared to some of these other types of extreme........

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