People Care About Climate Change If Someone Tells Them
People will show an interest in and have opinions about climate change. That is often because they are pressured with information about the subject.
According to a new paper from UCLA and Princeton titled “People Care About Climate Change If Someone Tells Them,” “we find that presenting people with binary climate data (for example, lake freeze history) significantly increases the perceived impact of climate change.”
Boiling Frog
A slower and less aggressive approach to information does not work well. “Continuous data (mean temperature)” is nowhere as effective. People need to be shocked into reality.
UCLA communications professor and cognitive psychologist Rachit Dubey summed up the issue. “For years, we assumed that if the climate worsened enough, people would act, but instead, we’re seeing the ‘boiling frog’ effect, where humans continuously reset their perception of ‘normal’ every few years. People are adjusting to worsening environmental conditions, like multiple fire seasons per year, disturbingly fast. My research examines how people are mentally adapting to the negative changes in our environment.”
People in L.A. probably did not worry about wildfires or doubt until the areas where they lived were either threatened by fire or burned down. The same might be said of people in Florida. Huge hurricanes are interesting on paper, but it is different when someone has a house washed out to sea.
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