How do we get people to take personal action to fight climate chaos? I’m not talking about mobilizing every last person in the world or even those in any of the wealthier nations. If we could get 51% to understand the staggering consequences of further delay, and then acting on that new found realization, I’d be deliriously happy. But as we all know, spreading the word, and in the process fighting the well financed and/or ideologically motivated deniers, is a chore that Sisyphus wouldn’t want to take on.
Is it possible that something else will happen besides an outreach/education campaign, some environmentally triggered catastrophe that would so starkly spell out the horrors that await thanks to our cumulative actions over the last century that it would finally make us take action? I hate to use the term, but is it possible that we could have the environmental equivalent of the Pearl Harbor Attack?
I’ve expressed the opinion online that I honestly don’t think it could happen, at least not here in the US. Pick your nightmare scenario–a category 5 hurricane hits Washington DC or NYC or Boston or Houston, causing almost unimaginable human and monetary damage. Or maybe the water supplies of some high population area or areas collapse, creating a desperate need for a massive humanitarian relief effort, larger than anything in human history, and also creating millions of climate refugees. Or perhaps there’s a sudden leap in polar melting, and we see an ice-free Arctic Ocean in just a few years, or the West Antarctic Ice Shelf unexpectedly starts to collapse. In any of those scenarios, I think we’d see wall-to-wall press coverage and a steely resolve to Do Something To Fix It (even as the deniers went into overdrive with a variety of “explanations” for why we should do nothing) that quickly faded into complacency.
Put simply: I see climate chaos as a classic left brain problem. We can’t rely on our evolutionary history to push us into action, but instead have to let the facts and logic dictate our actions. We have to make changes we don’t want to make (an immediate, personal cost) to achieve a much tougher to discern and much longer term benefit.
I honestly don’t know how to solve this problem. The article below is the best short treatment I’ve seen of this situation. Highly recommended.
Yale Environment 360: Beyond Abstraction: Moving The Public on Climate Action:
Humans have been wired by evolution to respond to the most immediate threats, ones they can hear or smell or see — like the lions approaching our ancestral watering holes in the Serengeti. So in searching for answers as to why society has been so slow to react to one of the greatest threats facing the planet today — global warming — this deeply ingrained instinct is a good place to start. Climate change just doesn’t offer those kinds of sensory signals — at least not yet — and humans have not felt the need to react, according to researchers.
“Danger brings emotional reactions, dread, a feeling of alarm. Evolution has equipped us with that,” says Elke Weber, director of the Center for Research on Environmental Decisions at Columbia University. “The threats we face today are not of that type. They are psychologically removed in space and time. So cognitively, we know something needs to be done about climate change, but we don’t have that emotional alarm bell going off.”
Weber is one of a handful of researchers trying to unravel a glaring contradiction: Even though global temperatures are rising, the Arctic ice cap is melting, scientists are offering increasingly urgent warnings about climate change, and polls show Americans acknowledging that the threat of global warming is real, we’re still not doing very much about the problem.
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Changing behavior, then, becomes a complicated process. Leiserowitz, working with the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication, recently released research findings showing how complicated the task may be.
Their analysis from an opinion poll of environmental attitudes of 2,164 adults identifies six groups, which they call the “Six Americas.” Those groups react to different messages, to different messengers, and in different ways to information on climate change. Leiserowitz argues that moving society on this issue will require a tailored approach to each.
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More worrisome is the politicization of the issue. In another large-scale study on public attitudes, Barry Rabe — a political scientist and professor of environmental policy at University of Michigan who worked with the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia — found that 83 percent of Democrats believe global warming is happening, while only 53 percent of Republicans do so.
“That really did surprise us,” Rabe said. “No matter how you asked the questions, there wasn’t much diversity by state, age, income, gender. The one that jumped out time after time was partisan affiliation.”
