Climate Inaction: All in Our Heads?
Why don't people respond to the threat of global climate disruption by changing their behavior? The newly-released report of the American Psychological Association Task Force on Climate Change has some answers.
The APA says psychological factors help explain our slow reaction to the threat of global warming. "While most Americans think climate change is an important issue, they don't see it as an immediate threat, so getting people to "go green" requires policymakers, scientists and marketers to look at psychological barriers to change and what leads people to action."
The report cites a national Pew Research Center poll in which 75 percent to 80 percent of respondents said that climate change is an important issue. But respondents ranked it last in a list of 20 compelling issues, such as the economy or terrorism. Despite warnings from scientists and environmental experts that limiting the effects of climate change means humans need to make some severe changes now, people don't feel a sense of urgency. The task force said numerous psychological barriers are to blame, including:
Uncertainty - Research has shown that uncertainty over climate change reduces the frequency of "green" behavior.
Mistrust - Evidence shows that most people don't believe the risk messages of scientists or government officials.
Denial - A substantial minority of people believe climate change is not occurring or that human activity has little or nothing to do with it, according to various polls.
Undervaluing Risks - A study of more than 3,000 people in 18 countries showed that many people believe environmental conditions will worsen in 25 years. While this may be true, this thinking could lead people to believe that changes can be made later.
Lack of Control - People believe their actions would be too small to make a difference and choose to do nothing.
Habit - Ingrained behaviors are extremely resistant to permanent change while others change slowly. Habit is the most important obstacle to pro-environment behavior, according to the report.
I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. Has the APA answered the big question? Or are they missing all the less-easily-quantifiable reasons why people aren't yet really responding to the threat of chronic climate destabilization?
To read the whole report, go to at http://www.apa.org/releases/climate-change.pdf or read the APA press release at http://www.apa.org/releases/climate-change.html
Press coverage of the report can be found at
Climate Inaction: It's All In Our Heads
U.S. News & World Report
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Booster Shots - LA Times health blog.
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By Andrew C. Revkin - Aug. 5
Dot Earth - New York Times environment blog.
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See Linda Buzzell's Profile
It makes me really sad (but not surprised) to see that this thread has been hijacked by climate change deniers. There seems to be a war of ideas going on about this issue, with the deniers, like the health care reform opponents, mostly supported by corporations who have a lot of money to lose if we face the current threat and take actions to mitigate it.
Look at it this way, deniers: if you're wrong and you've prevented us from doing anything, the whole planet is in trouble, including your grandkids. If you're right and we "mistakenly" take steps to get off fossil fuels, the worst that happens is our country becomes a power-house in alternative energy and we don't need to go to war to grab the last scraps of oil.
Either way, it makes a lot more sense to be safe than sorry.
Linda, almost every article about climate change is hijacked by deniers. They repeat the same misinformation over and over again. For example, they believe that because temperatures do not increase incrementally each year negates climate change or they point to phony lists of scientists who supposedly debunk climate change. Their arguments are misinformed and nonsensical, but they repeat them endlessly. They really do not care if they are right or wrong, but just want to block change in our relationship to how we produce energy. I guess the only positive light is that these people who make the same misleading posts are the same people time and time again. Once anyone has written here a while, he of she knows their names. They repeat the same misinformation dozens of times under each article on climate change. By the way, keep up the good work!
See Linda Buzzell's Profile
Thanks, realpolitic.
Oil industry expert Jan Lundberg offers this analysis of climate-change denial: "Climate-change denialism, or just the denial of human-caused global warming, is on the rise or becoming more prominent precisely because the evidence for irrefutable human impacts is more and more obvious. And the implications are that we must change our lifestyles, and corporate greed will have to take a back seat to humanity's greater interests.
To read the rest of the article, go to...
http://cul
Are you really so blinded by your "cause" to be unable to recognize the folly in labeling your opposition as corporate shills and "deniers"? You will certainly not change the behavior of any shills amongst them and the "deniers" label puts you in the company of those using "evildoers" as a label which is doubtless an association you would like to avoid. However, any of those opposing your viewpoint with sincerity are not likely to appreciate having their views dismissed in such a disrespectful way.
Basically, name-calling will not win you any friends among to only group here that you might have a chance to influence. I would think they taught that sort of thing in Psych 101.
lff
I'm all for getting off of oil and moving to alternative energy - I was for it in the 70's - for any number of reasons (AGW among them). However, you are doing no one's cause any good by trivializing the costs involved. You come across as a typical American aware that you might have to turn down your A/C or even bike to work, but oblivious to the real costs and suffering involved in a transition to another energy source for those in the world who think of A/C as openning a window and a rice-paper fan.
lff.
Climate isn't "destabili
Think the world is predictable? What will the temperature be in New York City one year from now? Will the minimum level of sea ice in the Arctic Ocean in September, 2009 be greater or less than two years ago? Than four years ago? Will the global temperature for 2009 be greater or lower than in 1998?
See Linda Buzzell's Profile
Climate change denial is a religious belief, not science. If you read my original post, you'll see that this kind of falsification of the facts is a core problem, causing people not to change their behavior in a way that would save humankind from terrible suffering to come. In my view this is unethical and immoral.
To put the facts bluntly: there is now a consensus by scientists that the climate is changing (hello - why do you think the glaciers are melting?) and that human activities like fossil fuel burning are the cause. Scientists are also now able to predict what will happen if this situation continues, and the threat to us and our children and grandchildren is very real and very frightening.
Who benefits from putting out these lies that prevent us making sane environmental changes? (I also wonder who benefits from the lies being put out about the supposed dangers of universal health care). The answer is always the same: certain economic interests (oil companies, insurance companies etc. and the policians they control) who feel threatened by the facts. History will show that these lies by corporate interests have caused incalculable harm.
The media has a responsibility to call out the disseminators of such harmful falsehoods.
I could make the same argument that belief in the anthropogenic global warming theory is also religious in nature. Climate science is a soft science. There are large gaps in what we observe and the mechanisms we understand - which is why there is still debate on the subject. Scientists can use models to attempt to bridge those gaps, but anyone familiar with statistics (and the omiited variable problem) knows the uncertainties.
A consensus of scientists knows the greenhouse effect is amplified by human activitiy - we KNOW its at work. We also know that temperatures were higher in the later half of the 20th century than in the earlier half. That's about where the consensus ends... (Not that a PHD headcount scorecard proves ANY theory, but regardless).
The doom and gloom is highly spectulative, and relies on assumptions of a sensitive climate system that is dominated by positive feedbacks. I don't think there's good empirical evidence that nature behaves that way. I also don't think it makes much sense to take a linear regression of a temperature time-series and extrapolate it into the future - especially not when the supposed signal is weaker than the noise.
Just my $.02
Linda, unfortunately science doesn't work the way you have explained it. Consensus is not truth. At one time there was a consensus that the earth was the center of the Universe. Not too long ago there was a consensus that the Universe was static rather than expanding (which is the current consensus).
Actually supporting AGW seems to be more a religious belief rather than the other way around. Look how you addressed the non-believers as "denialist
The facts that we have is CO2 is a greenhouse gas that will cause the temperature to increase. We also know that this increase is logrithmic in nature, that is one molecule of CO2 will raise the temperature X while the very next molecule of CO2 will raise the temperature X-y. Both the alarmists and the skeptics agree on this.
There are two points of disagreement between alarmists and skeptics. Alarmists and the models they use have a very high positive feedback in addition to the warming due to CO2. The IPCC's models have this feedback increasing temperatures from 3 to as high as 10 times the amount due to CO2 by itself. The major feedback greenhouse gas is water vapor.
Skeptics see the feedback as only slightly positive or even negative. The lack of a hotspot in the troposphere in the tropics and the lack of other physical evidence of the high positive feedback feeds these views.
The second problem we have is that there are many other things affecting the climate so skeptics aren't willing to assign temperature increases that we saw in the last half of the 70s throught the end of the Century as due primarily to CO2. During this period the sun was very active (sunspots--we are now in just the opposite phase with almost no sunspots), the Pacific Current (PDO) was in it's warming 30 year cycle, etc. There is a theory on cosmic waves affecting cloud formation which can affect the amount of heat that reaches the earth or is reflected back into space. There are many other theories of what causes warming and cooling of the planet.
If you would google the science of AGW the theory basically comes down to this.
It was warming rapidly in the 1970s-2000.
CO2 was increasing rapidly also.
CO2 is a greenhouse gas which will warm the planet.
Since we can't think of anything else that could have caused the warming it will be up
to the skeptics to prove it isn't CO2.
Today the facts we have are
There has been no increases in surface temperatures in the past 10 years
There has been no increases in the ocean temperature in the past 5 years (this is when we launched the Argo system to measure this).
CO2 has continued to increase during these periods, so as a skeptic I must ask
"Where's the heat?"
The hotspot we should have over the tropics in the troposphere is no where to be found and this is the signature the IPCC said we would have if CO2 was causing the warming.
There is no proof CO2 caused this warming and in fact there is a serious lack of indicators the warming we have experienced is caused by a greenhouse gas. . Your "consensus" is getting weaker and weaker.
The reason people aren't taking action is because you are asking them to take action based upon your belief, not science that is overwhelmingly convincing. It is a rational response perhaps best exemplified by the fable, "The boy who cried wolf."
"To put the facts bluntly: there is now a consensus.
To put it bluntly you need to go back to school and learn what science really is. "facts" are not determined by "consensus" in the hard sciences. This is a well known logical fallacy called "The argument from authority". Unfortunately, ignorance of science is a widespread problem with the cheerleaders for environmental action.
lff
One can certainly say that in five years the Artic sea ice will have reached new minimums. All one has to do is look at the trends. To argue that sea ice and temperatures differ annually and therefore that dispels anthropogenic climate change is a game played by the very uninformed. To argue that the climate has always been changing and pretend climate scientists are not aware of this obvious fact is again only relevant to the very uninformed. We are talking about anthropogenic change fed by greenhouse gases being released into the atmpsohere, particularly co2 and not natural change.
Richard, so many of your arguments just play to the uninformed crowd and are not relevant to real scientists in the slightest. This fact explains why the denying crowd is so far out of the mainstream.
An ecopsychologist's reaction to the APA report:
http://www
See Linda Buzzell's Profile
Dr. Calif, I agree that the APA's report focuses primarily on what is preventing the pro-social green behavioral changes of individual citizens rather than what is stopping governments or businesses from behaving in a socially- and environmen
In this society too many of us seem to be operating from a top-down "marketing" point of view, so the premise seems to be that we just need to do a better job of "marketing" green behaviors to "consumers
What I'd really like to see is an awake citizenry that demands responsible behavior from its governments and corporations. But we've been put to sleep by decades of just this kind of psychologi
We can see all of these factors at work in the health care debate as well as the climate change pseudo-debate. Thanks to misinformation, disinformation plus behind-closed-doors government dealmaking with the insurance and pharma industries, people are confused and not demanding the solutions that are in their own best interests.
The difference with global climate change is the urgency of the situation. If we screw up on the health care issue, we can try again in a few years when we realize the half-way reforms and band-aids didn't do the trick. But with global climate disruption it may be too late.
Linda, you are sounding the alarm. Based on what? Al Gore telling you we have only 10 years left to fix the planet? The UN telling us we have only four months (Is it just me or did you notice that is just about the exact date the UN is having it's follow up to Kyoto in Copenhagen). Or perhaps Prince Charles letting us know we have only 8 years.
This whole movement sounds more like a used car sales pitch than scientific study.
If Al Gore and congress won't change their private jet lifestyle why should we?
See Linda Buzzell's Profile
Bob, others' bad behavior doesn't get you off the hook. Al Gore is at least trying to get the word out before it's too late. Congress people are forced by our current system to go back and forth to their constituencies in order to vote. What's your justification for not doing anything to cut your carbon footprint?
It was my understanding that most private government jets are used by congress for junkets, not to return to their districts. And what exactly is wrong with commercial travel? And why would you make excuses for these people instead of holding their feet to the fire? And if the largest emmitters refuse to do anything, why should the smallest?
As for your argument that it's OK for Al because at least he is trying to get the word out, would it be OK for me to rob and rape as long as I encorage others not to rob and rape?
Linda,
My justification for not trying to cut my carbon footprint is two fold.
First, the idea that a trace gas (not a pollutant) is going to cause the end of the world is nonsense.
Secondly, CO2 is fertilizer for life. The biomass has increased since CO2 has gone up. Plants grow better (optimum level of CO2 seems to be 1000ppm--right now we are at 380ppm) have bigger fruit and use less water. So not only are you causing pain in the underdeveloped nations growing crops for biofuels, but reducing the carbon in the atmosphere will decrease the food available in non-biofuel crops.
I read the full report, and I note that the APA fails to list its long alliance with advertising as a significant factor driving wasteful consumption. Nor does it offer any analysis of the psychology that drives huge corporate entities like Exxon to ravage the planet. The APA is embedded in the paradigm of the machine, whose language includes recommendations to "make" people think differently and to "target" various populations: in other words, the same paradigm that helped APA members set up secret torture programs for which they have never been held fully accountable.
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