Dear All,
This op-ed in the Sunday New York Times, which is interesting in its
entirety, discusses an experiment in which if you tell people about
geoengineering, they are more likely to believe in climate change. I
found it an interesting idea, but as is discussed, the problem of
educating the public is complex, as also pointed out by Paul Krugman.
The links and text are below.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/22/opinion/sunday/were-all-climate-change-idiots.html
We’re All Climate-Change Idiots
By BETH GARDINER
CLIMATE CHANGE is staring us in the face. The science is clear, and the
need to reduce planet-warming emissions has grown urgent. So why,
collectively, are we doing so little about it?
Yes, there are political and economic barriers, as well as some strong
ideological opposition, to going green. But researchers in the
burgeoning field of climate psychology have identified another obstacle,
one rooted in the very ways our brains work. The mental habits that help
us navigate the local, practical demands of day-to-day life, they say,
make it difficult to engage with the more abstract, global dangers posed
by climate change.
Robert Gifford, a psychologist at the University of Victoria in British
Columbia who studies the behavioral barriers to combating climate
change, calls these habits of mind “dragons of inaction.” We have
trouble imagining a future drastically different from the present. We
block out complex problems that lack simple solutions. We dislike
delayed benefits and so are reluctant to sacrifice today for future
gains. And we find it harder to confront problems that creep up on us
than emergencies that hit quickly.
“You almost couldn’t design a problem that is a worse fit with our
underlying psychology,” says Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale
Project on Climate Change Communication.
Sometimes, when forming our opinions, we grasp at whatever information
presents itself, no matter how irrelevant. A new study by the
psychologist Nicolas Guéguen, published in last month’s Journal of
Environmental Psychology, found that participants seated in a room with
a ficus tree lacking foliage were considerably more likely to say that
global warming was real than were those in a room with a ficus tree that
had foliage.
We also tend to pay attention to information that reinforces what we
already believe and dismiss evidence that would require us to change our
minds, a phenomenon known as confirmation bias. Dan M. Kahan, a Yale Law
School professor who studies risk and science communication, says this
is crucial to understanding the intense political polarization on
climate change. He and his research colleagues have found that people
with more hierarchical, individualistic worldviews (generally
conservatives) sense that accepting climate science would lead to
restraints on commerce, something they highly value, so they often
dismiss evidence of the risk. Those with a more egalitarian,
community-oriented mind-set (generally liberals) are likely to be
suspicious of industry and very ready to credit the idea that it is
harming the environment.
There are ways to overcome such prejudices. Professor Kahan has shown
that how climate change solutions are framed can affect our views of the
problem. In one study, not yet published, he and his colleagues asked
people to assess a scientific paper reporting that the climate was
changing faster than expected. Beforehand, one group was asked to read
an article calling for tighter carbon caps (i.e., a regulatory
solution); a second group read an article urging work on geoengineering,
the manipulation of atmospheric conditions (i.e., a technological
solution); and a control group read an unrelated story on traffic
lights. All three groups included hierarchical individualists and
egalitarian communitarians.
In all cases, the individualists were, as expected, less likely than the
communitarians to say the scientific paper seemed valid. But the gap was
29 percent smaller among those who had first been exposed to the
geoengineering idea than among those who had been prompted to think
about regulating carbon, and 14 percent smaller than in the traffic
light group. Thinking about climate change as a technological challenge
rather than as a regulatory problem, it seems, made individualists more
ready to credit the scientific claim about the climate.
Research also suggests public health is an effective frame: few people
care passionately about polar bears, but if you argue that closing
coal-burning plants will reduce problems like asthma, you’re more likely
to find a receptive audience, says the American University
communications professor Matthew Nisbet.
Smaller “nudges,” similarly sensitive to our psychological quirks, can
also spur change. Taking advantage of our preference for immediate
gratification, energy monitors that displayed consumption levels in
real-time cut energy use by an average of 7 percent, according to a
study in the journal Energy in 2010. Telling heavy energy users how much
less power their neighbors consumed prompted them to cut their own use,
according to a 2007 study in Psychological Science. And trading on our
innate laziness, default settings have also conserved resources: when
Rutgers University changed its printers’ settings to double-sided, it
saved more than seven million sheets of paper in one semester in 2007.
Simply presenting climate science more clearly is unlikely to change
attitudes. But a better understanding of our minds’ strange workings may
help save us from ourselves.
Beth Gardiner is a freelance journalist.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/23/opinion/krugman-loading-the-climate-dice.html
Loading the Climate Dice
By PAUL KRUGMAN
A couple of weeks ago the Northeast was in the grip of a severe heat
wave. As I write this, however, it’s a fairly cool day in New Jersey,
considering that it’s late July. Weather is like that; it fluctuates.
And this banal observation may be what dooms us to climate catastrophe,
in two ways. On one side, the variability of temperatures from day to
day and year to year makes it easy to miss, ignore or obscure the
longer-term upward trend. On the other, even a fairly modest rise in
average temperatures translates into a much higher frequency of extreme
events — like the devastating drought now gripping America’s heartland —
that do vast damage.
On the first point: Even with the best will in the world, it would be
hard for most people to stay focused on the big picture in the face of
short-run fluctuations. When the mercury is high and the crops are
withering, everyone talks about it, and some make the connection to
global warming. But let the days grow a bit cooler and the rains fall,
and inevitably people’s attention turns to other matters.
Making things much worse, of course, is the role of players who don’t
have the best will in the world. Climate change denial is a major
industry, lavishly financed by Exxon, the Koch brothers and others with
a financial stake in the continued burning of fossil fuels. And
exploiting variability is one of the key tricks of that industry’s
trade. Applications range from the Fox News perennial — “It’s cold
outside! Al Gore was wrong!” — to the constant claims that we’re
experiencing global cooling, not warming, because it’s not as hot right
now as it was a few years back.
How should we think about the relationship between climate change and
day-to-day experience? Almost a quarter of a century ago James Hansen,
the NASA scientist who did more than anyone to put climate change on the
agenda, suggested the analogy of loaded dice. Imagine, he and his
associates suggested, representing the probabilities of a hot, average
or cold summer by historical standards as a die with two faces painted
red, two white and two blue. By the early 21st century, they predicted,
it would be as if four of the faces were red, one white and one blue.
Hot summers would become much more frequent, but there would still be
cold summers now and then.
And so it has proved. As documented in a new paper by Dr. Hansen and
others, cold summers by historical standards still happen, but rarely,
while hot summers have in fact become roughly twice as prevalent. And 9
of the 10 hottest years on record have occurred since 2000.
But that’s not all: really extreme high temperatures, the kind of thing
that used to happen very rarely in the past, have now become fairly
common. Think of it as rolling two sixes, which happens less than 3
percent of the time with fair dice, but more often when the dice are
loaded. And this rising incidence of extreme events, reflecting the same
variability of weather that can obscure the reality of climate change,
means that the costs of climate change aren’t a distant prospect,
decades in the future. On the contrary, they’re already here, even
though so far global temperatures are only about 1 degree Fahrenheit
above their historical norms, a small fraction of their eventual rise if
we don’t act.
The great Midwestern drought is a case in point. This drought has
already sent corn prices to their highest level ever. If it continues,
it could cause a global food crisis, because the U.S. heartland is still
the world’s breadbasket. And yes, the drought is linked to climate
change: such events have happened before, but they’re much more likely
now than they used to be.
Now, maybe this drought will break in time to avoid the worst. But there
will be more events like this. Joseph Romm, the influential climate
blogger, has coined the term “Dust-Bowlification
<http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2011/10/26/353997/nature-dust-bowlification-food-insecurity/>”
for the prospect of extended periods of extreme drought in formerly
productive agricultural areas. He has been arguing for some time that
this phenomenon, with its disastrous effects on food security, is likely
to be the leading edge of damage from climate change, taking place over
the next few decades; the drowning of Florida by rising sea levels and
all that will come later.
And here it comes.
Will the current drought finally lead to serious climate action? History
isn’t encouraging. The deniers will surely keep on denying, especially
because conceding at this point that the science they’ve trashed was
right all along would be to admit their own culpability for the looming
disaster. And the public is all too likely to lose interest again the
next time the die comes up white or blue.
But let’s hope that this time is different. For large-scale damage from
climate change is no longer a disaster waiting to happen. It’s happening
now.
--
Alan
Alan Robock, Professor II (Distinguished Professor)
Editor, Reviews of Geophysics
Director, Meteorology Undergraduate Program
Associate Director, Center for Environmental Prediction
Department of Environmental Sciences Phone: +1-732-932-9800 x6222
Rutgers University Fax: +1-732-932-8644
14 College Farm Road E-mail: [email protected]
New Brunswick, NJ 08901-8551 USA http://envsci.rutgers.edu/~robock
--
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