Few climate activists were surprised when a YouGov poll
published in late September comfirmed what many already suspected: the British
public are not particularly worried about global warming. A minority of 39%
responded that they believed climate change posed a serious problem affecting
the world as a whole compared to 61% for poverty and 77% for terrorism. When
asked which issue they believed presented the gravest global threat only 6% of
those polled selected climate change.
Contrast this with the words of UN General Secretary Ban
Ki-Moon who, just two days after the poll was released, warned that
humanity has never in its history faced a challenge greater than that of
confronting climate change. “The human, environmental and financial cost of
climate change is fast becoming unbearable,” he declared in his opening address
to the UN climate summit in New York. A month later the Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change (IPCC) published its most comprehensive study to date - a
collaboration between thousands of climate scientists drawing together all the
available evidence in one synthesised report.
“Continued emission of greenhouse gases will cause further
warming and long-lasting changes in all components of the climate system,
increasing the likelihood of severe, pervasive and irreversible impacts for
people and ecosystems. Limiting climate change would require substantial and
sustained reductions in greenhouse gas emissions which, together with
adaptation, can limit climate change risks,” the report concluded.
The contrast outlined above poses some obvious questions.
Why does the disparity between expert opinion and public concern over climate
change remain so great and what can be done to address it? Are humans
psychologically incapable of facing up to the horrific likely consequences of
global warming as described by scientists?
These are the themes explored in a recently published book
by climate activist George Marshall, titled Don’t Even Think about It: Why our brains are wired to ignore
climate change. The book argues that society’s apparent lack of concern over
global warming is largely down to popular narratives which portray the issue as
less immediate than other problems like terrorism.
The title of the book, Marshall concedes, is slightly
misleading since he doesn’t believe that we are innately incapable of paying
attention to or comprehending the issue. “It’s not so much that we’re wired to
ignore climate change…The problem with climate change is that because it does
not have immediacy, it’s not something that readily works with our inbuilt
threat detectors,” he explains.
To give a contrasting example, Marshall cites sensational
media stories about immigration which have captured the imagination of millions
of people in the UK and fuelled the rise of UKIP. “I live in a rural part of
wales where there’s quite a lot of concern about immigration despite the fact
there are virtually no immigrants here,” he says. “Immigration is a very
powerful socially conveyed narrative. The issue is that there are things about
climate change which make it hard to form a compelling social narrative.”
Whereas stories about immigration and terrorism involve real
experiences of real people living in the real world, stories about climate
change tend to involve predicted events which could possibly occur to people
living in a hypothetical future. Although temperature rises and changes in
climate patterns over the long term can be attributed to anthropogenic global
warming, scientists are unable to draw a direct link between climate change and
individual extreme weather events.
Furthermore, the victims of such events – who would make
compelling protagonists – are often unwilling to accept that anthropogenic
climate change is real. After spending time with survivors of floods and
hurricanes in the US, Marshall found that many of them were understandably
intent on restoring their lives to the way things were before the storm and
were hostile to narratives which focussed on the need to change their
lifestyles in order to avoid similar disasters in the future.
Marshall says that the dominant narratives on solving climate
change tend to appeal to socially liberal people meaning that those with
socially conservative values are quickly turned off. The key, Marshall argues,
is to create narratives which speak to the full spectrum of human values and
concerns.
“A lot of my work at the moment is to work with people with
right wing political values and see what climate change would look like from
their point of view. And it looks very different,” he says.
“Climate change
then isn’t a threat to polar bears but it’s a threat to their landscape, their
culture, their sense of continuity, it’s a threat to freedom. I quote for
example, an anti-abortion campaigner who has taken climate change as being a
threat to the unborn child.”
Marshall’s observations are backed up by wealth of research
which shows a strong correlation between people’s political affiliations and
attitudes to global warming.
“People’s world view is clearly the strongest predictor of
their attitude towards climate change,” says Professor Stephan Lewandowsky of
the University of Bristol who has conducted extensive research on the
psychology of climate change. “I can ask people four questions about the free
market and if they tell me in their responses that they really care about the
free market as the best way to distribute goods in a society then I can be
almost certain that they will also say climate change isn’t happening and is
nothing to worry about.”
Many supporters of neoliberal economics recognise that any
solution to climate change would have to involve greater interference with and
regulation of global markets - a solution which, to their mind, is more
dangerous than the problem.
Responses in climate change polls also vary widely depending
on the way the questions are phrased.
“The tricky thing is that you have to ask
people in a way that doesn’t trigger their political identification,” explains
Lewandowsky. “When you do that you find that 70-80% of people know exactly that
climate change is occurring, that it’s a real risk and that it’s going to get
worse.”
But how do you get people to care? Marshall wants us to
rewrite the narratives in a way that makes climate change appear more urgent
and real. But there may be psychological dangers in this approach too.
According to CRED - the Center for Research on Environmental Decisions - a
growing body of scientific evidence shows attempts to scare people into action
with fear-based appeals actually result in increased climate scepticism.
“Anybody who runs a fear campaign will always combine that
appeal to fear with a presumed solution to the problem,” says Lewandowsky.
“Fear campaigns are very effective if they offer you the solutions.”
A fear campaign over the spread of ISIS in the middle-east,
for example, will swiftly be followed by a proposed bombing campaign in faraway
lands. Regardless of whether the strategy is effective or morally virtuous, the
solution appears simple. In the case of global warming, Lewandowsky argues, the
solutions are complex, nuanced, and less easily digestible.
There are some signs that the green movement is taking note
of this. Natalie Bennett, leader of the Green Party in England and Wales says
that over the years there has been a gradual shift within the environmental
movement away from fear based appeals and towards a greater focus on people’s
primary concerns.
“Putting more fear into the system really isn’t a
constructive way forward. It’s very important for the Green movement to talk
about how we can have a better quality of life because people are living with a
sense of insecurity and we’ve got to provide solutions for that. For example,
fuel poverty can be tackled by things like home energy conservation, home
insulation and other measures,” she says.
Climate activists clearly face a number of challenges in
communicating their message. But looking forward, Bennett is hopeful that
attitudes to global warming will improve, citing polls which show around 70% of people in
Britain now believe that human activity is contributing to climate change
despite large sections of the media remaining sceptical. She also insists that
the current political climate makes it easier for politicians like her to
deliver this message.
“I think it’s so much easier now than it would have been
before 2007 in that people really are acknowledging that our current system is
broken in all sorts of ways,” she explains.
“The economic and social inequality, the fact that young
people can’t get jobs they can build a life on. That actually makes people much
more amenable to new ideas and new ways of thinking. If you go back to 2007
people were feeling relatively comfortable and safe about the economy and their
jobs and that made saying: ‘right we’ve got to change everything!’ a lot more
difficult than it is now.”
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