Beyond Abstraction: Moving The Public on Climate Action

[OKIsItJustMe]

http://e360.yale.edu/content/feature.msp?id=2157

28 May 2009: Report

Beyond Abstraction: Moving The Public on Climate Action

Most Americans believe climate change is a serious problem but are not committed to making the hard choices needed to deal with it. Recent research begins to explain some of the reasons why.

by doug struck

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.

Scientists are exploring new theories about what affects behavior concerning global warming, such as people’s decisions to give up their SUVs, weatherize their houses, or support tougher environmental legislation. This research has moved beyond the old theory of rational action that predicted we would make logical changes in our behavior if we were given the right information about a problem.

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[jwirr]

1. Denial also plays into this lack of effort. Our SE is showing definite

signs of global warming with all the fires, water shortages and extreme heat and yet no one seems ready to realize that the area may soon be uninhabitable. Gas prices reach all time highs and we insist that it is only because it is being manipulated. We are in a depression because this time we are truly out of money and we think that it can change over night. There are a lot of problems we are ignoring. Could be that one of these time it will be too late when we finally wake up.