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Risk Perception
Hope springs eternal, scientists say
ABC Emily Bourke October 10, 2011
Hope springs eternal in the human breast;
Man never Is, but always To be blest:
The soul, uneasy and confin'd from home,
Rests and expatiates in a life to come.
Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man
English poet Alexander Pope got it right in the 1700s when he wrote "Hope springs eternal in the human breast".
A new British study has found human beings are hard-wired to be optimistic, even in the face of a darker reality.
Scientists led by Tali Sharot at the University College London studied a group of people who were told they were likely to experience something bad.
The results found most people stayed highly optimistic.
And the researchers say the study shows why people are often foolhardy, naive or overly ambitious.
"We tend to learn more from positive information about the future," Dr Sharot said.
"The reason is that regions of the front of your brain are very good at tracking and coding for positive information about the future.
"When you get negative information about the future, the frontal lobes don't code that information as efficiently."
Dr Sharot is also the author of a book called The Optimism Bias, which explains how the human brain is hard-wired for hope.
AUDIO: Human brain accentuates the positive (AM)
"Now it doesn't mean that we don't remember positive or negative information, it just means that we take positive [information] about the future in order to update our beliefs," she said.
"For example, if we learn that the probability of suffering from a certain disease is actually less than what we expected, we take that information and we update that belief of how likely we are to suffer a medical disease.
"But if we get negative information about the future, for example, everyone knows that divorce rates are about 50 per cent, we don't take that information as relevant to us and don't change or estimate on how likely we are to get divorced."
Even in the face of mounting negative information about the likelihood of illness, accident or even heartbreak, people still cling to the positive."It's some sort of denial. We think that we will be okay. This is not going to happen to us. You can say it's some sort of denial," Dr Sharot said.
But she warned downplaying the negative comes at a cost.
"We might not take the precautionary actions needed," she said.
"For example, you might not go to medical screening as often as you should because you think you are going to be okay.
"You might not buy insurance, and when we talk about financial markets, what happens is the optimism bias of all of the individuals come together into a bubble and actually a bias that is much, much bigger, and in that situation it can be ever more dangerous."
Dr Sharot says the research also provides insights into mental illness.
"If we know how the healthy brain works, we get insight into what happens in mental illness such as depression.
"The second thing we learn is that optimism doesn't change your beliefs. It will actually make you more likely to take actions to protect yourself."
Looking on the bright side, the findings show being optimistic makes us more adventurous and productive, lowers stress and anxiety, and promotes health and wellbeing.
The research is published in the journal Nature Neuroscience.
Why Do We Want to Delay Actions on Climate Change?
Effects of Probability and Timing of Climate Consequences
VARUN DUTTand CLEOTILDE GONZALEZ
This research tests people’s support for the ‘‘wait-and-see’’ approach in climate change due to the uncertainty in both the timing and probability of future consequences. In a laboratory experiment, carbon-tax consequences were presented to participants in one of two forms: a written description, where the probability, consequences, and timing were explicitly provided; and experience, where the probability, consequences, and timing were sampled through unlabeled buttons. Four problems were presented in each condition such that the probability of consequences was high or low and the timing was early or late. Results indicated that the proportion of wait-and-see choices was greater in experience than description. Furthermore, in both experience and description, the proportion of wait-and-see choices was greater when the probability was low rather than high. The difference in the proportion of wait-and-see choices between the low and high probability was amplified in experience and attenuated in description. Finally, there was no difference in the proportion of wait-and-see choices when the timing of climate consequences was early rather than late in both experience and description. These results are explained by people’s risk and time preferences. Read more
The real climate message is in the shadows
by Daniel Voronoff
There was more than one kernel of truth in the speech made by the Shadow Minister for Communications Malcolm Turnbull at the Virginia Chadwick Foundation back in July. But the one I’d like to look at is the analogy about how not listening to the science on climate change: …is like ignoring the advice of your doctor to give up smoking and lose 10 kilos on the basis that somebody down the pub told you their uncle Ernie ate three pies a day and smoked a packet of cigarettes and lived to 95. Malcolm Turnbull was commenting on the perils of denialism and its toxic effect on public discourse, however, the comparison also holds a very literal and crueller truth – global warming is a threat to human health. Read more
Managing Catastrophic Risk
by Ian Dunlop July 10, 2011
Australia prides itself, rightly, on its ability to respond to crises. During the Victorian bushfires, Queensland floods and Cyclone Yasi, which were almost certainly intensified by climate change, Australia’s disaster recovery systems acquitted themselves well. The excellent leadership shown by Premier Anna Bligh and others was widely commended, all of which is highly creditable. But it begs the question: “why are we not expending far more effort on preventative policies to avoid or minimize the impact of natural disasters in the first place?”. Read more
Reframing the climate change debate in Australia as a security threat
New Community Quarterly Article 2011-05-11
by Dr Kerry Wardlaw, Politics Department, Monash University.
This paper was presented at the Australian Climate Action Summit, April 2011.
At the moment there is a limited understanding of the implications of climate change by the Australian public. The media and political debate still defines it as greenie or environmental issue. This is not helped by Bob Brown repeatedly talking about the fate of the Great Barrier Reef or images of protestors dressed as cute Australian fauna.
I think there needs to be a very conscious effort by the climate movement to deepen the public’s understanding of climate change as a fundamental threat to human civilization. Read more
Public Risk Perceptions, Understandings, and Responses to Climate Change in Australia and Great Britain: Interim Report
by Joseph P. Reser, Nick Pidgeon, Alexa Spence, Graham Bradley, A. Ian Glendon & Michelle Ellul
Griffith University, Climate Change Response Program, Queensland, Australia, and Understanding Risk Centre, Cardiff University, Wales
This interim report provides an initial look at the national survey findings of a collaborative and cross-national research project by Griffith University (Australia) and Cardiff University (Wales) examining public risk perceptions, understandings and responses to the threat and unfolding impacts of climate change in Australia and Great Britain. Each of these surveys, in addition to shared questions and objectives, had additional and differing objectives, with the Australian survey also examining public perceptions, experience, and responses to natural disasters, and the British survey examining energy policies and futures in the United Kingdom. Read more
Climate change risk perception and policy preferences: the role of affect, imagery, and values
by Anthony Leiserowitz, Decision Research, 1201 Oak Street, Suite 200, Eugene, OR 97401
A national, representative survey of the U.S. public found that Americans have moderate climate change risk perceptions, strongly support a variety of national and international policies to mitigate climate change, and strongly oppose several carbon tax proposals. Drawing on the theoretical distinction between analytic and experiential decision-making, this study found that American risk perceptions and policy support are strongly influenced by experiential factors, including affect, imagery, and values, and demonstrates that public responses to climate change are influenced by both psychological and socio-cultural factors.
Taking action
Switch:How to change things when change is hard
by Chip and Dan Heath Chapter 1
Psychology for a Better World: Strategies to Inspire Sustainability
Psychology for a Better World is for people who believe it is worth trying to make a world in which both our species and the ecological systems we are part of can flourish. The book is based on the latest research in psychology and is jam packed with action strategies. It offers new ways to think about how people interact in social settings, why we are tempted to stick with what we know, and how the same characteristics that currently keep us hooked into unsustainable practices can be used to move us forward. The final chapter is a guide to help you analyse what you are doing to contribute towards a better world, and how you can be more effective while simultaneously increasing your personal wellbeing.
Niki Harré is an associate professor at the University of Auckland where she has taught social and community psychology for twelve years. Her recent research projects have focused on sustainable communities and schools, positive youth development and political activism. In 2007 Niki edited, with Quentin Atkinson, the book Carbon Neutral by 2020: How New Zealanders Can Tackle Climate Change. Niki is an active member of the Pt Chevalier Transition Town.
Communication
Apocalypse Not: The Oscars, The Media and the Myth of 'Constant Repetition of doomsday Messages' on Climate
By Joe Romm on Feb 26, 2012
The two greatest myths about global warming communications are 1) constant repetition of doomsday messages has been a major, ongoing strategy and 2) that strategy doesn’t work and indeed is actually counterproductive!
These myths are so deeply ingrained in the environmental and progressive political community that…..more
Better Understanding and Improving Climate Communications
Bud Ward January 25, 2012
Some 100 social scientists, communications experts, and climate scientists convene at University of Michigan’s Erb Institute/Union of Concerned Scientists session to better understand, improve climate communication dialogue.
A Host of Key Insights on Communications
Among key messages shared by expert presenters throughout the session, and seemingly accepted in large part by many of those in attendance: More
Insights from addictions recovery applied to climate change
Tue, 20th December, 2011
Dr Chris Johnstone, UK
For many years I worked as an addictions specialist in the UK health service, part of my role being to run groups exploring how to prevent relapses. One day the topic was ‘dealing with crisis’. John, a middle aged man, started the group by saying “I’m not sure I need to be here, as I don’t really have any crisis in my life”. Just a few weeks previously, John had been told he might only have a few months left to live if he carried on drinking. The life-threatening emergency of his alcoholic liver disease didn’t seem to have sunk in.
Over the last thirty years, each decade has been warmer than the last and predictions made years ago of a rise in weather related disasters have, tragically, been proved correct. Yet...... Read more
 | Debunking myths is problematic. Unless great care is taken, any effort to debunk misinformation can inadvertently reinforce the very myths one seeks to correct. To avoid these “backfire effects”, an effective debunking requires three major elements. First, the refutation must focus on core facts rather than the myth to avoid the misinformation becoming more familiar. Second, any mention of a myth should be preceded by explicit warnings to notify the reader that the upcoming information is false. Finally, the refutation should include an alternative explanation that accounts for important qualities in the original misinformation. More |
Yale project on climate change communication
See a collection of articles here
Emergency psychology
The Emergency of Climate Change: Why Are We Failing to Take Action?
Cynthia M. Frantz∗ and F. Stephan Mayer
Oberlin College, Ohio
Latane and Darley developed a five-stage model to understand why people do and do not help other people in emergency situations. We extend their five-stage model to explore why people do and do not take action against climate change. We identify the factors that make climate change difficult to notice and ambiguous as an emergency; we explore barriers to taking responsibility for action; and we discuss the issues of efficacy and costs versus benefits that make action unlikely. The resulting analysis is useful on two levels. For educators and policy makers,... Read more
Values and cultural cognition
The CWM effect: What climate change's biggest sceptics have in common?
Graham Readfearn August 18, 2011 - 1:25PM
Conservative white men ... (from top left) Cardinal George Pell, Andrew Bolt, Alan Jones and Christopher Monckton.
When it comes to climate change, most people have heard of the greenhouse effect, but what about the “conservative white male” effect?
A US-based study below has found that white men with politically conservative views are far more likely than the rest of the population to doubt the science of human-caused climate change.
And the "conservative white male effect” has been linked to Australia, with one prominent researcher citing the existence of a successful, politically engaged and outspoken coterie operating in high-profile positions that attract wide media coverage.
In the US researchers' paper published in the journal Global Environmental Change, Dr Aaron McCright and Dr Riley Dunlap analysed data from 10 annual US opinion polls on environmental issues.
They found 58 per cent of conservative white males - or CWMs for short - thought recent global temperature rises were not caused mainly from human activities, such as burning fossil fuels. This compared with 31 per cent of other adults.
Some 29 per cent of CWMs thought the effects of global warming would “never happen” compared with only seven per cent of other adults.
The paper, titled Cool dudes: The denial of climate change among conservative white males in the United States, found CWMs who claimed they understood the global warming issue “very well” were even more convinced that global warming wasn’t happening.
The researchers concluded that “organised climate change denial” had spread from US conservative think-tanks to other nations, including New Zealand and Australia.
They wrote: “Throughought these Anglo countries organised denial seems to be dominated by politically conservative white males, and this suggests that a similar conservative white male effect might be emerging in the general publics of these nations with regard to climate change denial.”
Professor Joseph Reser, a Research Fellow with Griffith University’s Climate Change Response Program in Queensland, agreed broadly with the findings, but said his own research and other comparable studies from the US and Europe suggested the proportion of true climate change sceptics was much smaller.
“If you look at this group of conservative white males, less than 30% are characterised as denialists - they are not a majority even within this grouping," Professer Reser said.
"But these CWMs tend to stand out and do well in many social, work, and political organisations; they align themselves with those sharing similar views; and they are also more likely to be outspoken in their views and politically engaged, and to work and operate in sectors where their views get aired more.”
He said the fact conservatives were unduly confident about their own views on climate change “also makes them less open to differing views or able to accept that they might be wrong”.
Dr Kelly Fielding, a senior researcher at the University of Queensland ’s Institute for Social Science Research, said political affiliation was strongly linked to climate change beliefs.
Dr Fielding was part of a research project which last year surveyed more than 300 Australian political leaders.
Only 38 per cent of Liberal-National politicians thought humans were causing global warming, compared to 89 per cent from Labor.
“We’ve shown results that are consistent with the US results,’’ she said. “Political ordination is the strongest predictor for what people believe about climate change.”
But she added that political conservatism wasn’t linked to climate scepticism everywhere, pointing to Germany and the UK as examples.
Dr Reser led a national survey last year of more than 3000 Australians which found 90 per cent of respondents accepted humans were “playing a causal role” in climate change. Less than six per cent could really be classified as strong disbelievers, he said. There was also a distinct gender divide, with more women willing to accept the scientific evidence.
“I don’t accept - nor does the evidence support - that there’s a high l evel of denial in Australia or North America,’’ he said. “It’s something of a cultivated urban myth - and a substantial misreading of where the public is at. There has been a small but strident group of climate sceptic lobbyists pushing that argument for a long time.”
Criticising the current political debate around climate change, Dr Reser added: "What’s happening with the Coalition and their prominent spokespersons is that they are playing on public concerns and worries about not only the profound threat of climate change, but multiple and interacting social, political, and environmental issues, both national and global.
“People in turn want to hear that things are not as bad as they appear to be. This might be an eff ective political strategy, but it is also a rather crass exploitation of very genuine public concerns for the sake of political point scoring – rather than seriously acknowledging or addressing these genuine concerns - or indeed the core challenges of climate change.
“This cynical political rhetoric is really unfortunate, it undermines well-founded public belief, scientific credibility, and political will, and it is part of the reason that this urban myth exists.”
A companion piece to this article: How facts backfire: Researchers discover a surprising threat to democracy: our brains
Cool dudes: The denial of climate change among conservative white males in the United States
Aaron M. McCright, Riley E. Dunlap
We examine whether conservative white males are more likely than are other adults in the U.S. general public to endorse climate change denial. We draw theoretical and analytical guidance from the identity- protective cognition thesis explaining the white male effect and from recent political psychology scholarship documenting the heightened system-justification tendencies of political conservatives. We utilize public opinion data from ten Gallup surveys from 2001 to 2010, focusing specifically on five indicators of climate change denial. We find that conservative white males are significantly more likely than are other Americans to endorse denialist views on all five items, and that these differences are even greater for those conservative white males who self-report understanding global warming very well. Furthermore, the results of our multivariate logistic regression models reveal that the conservative white male effect remains significant when controlling for the direct effects of political ideology, race, and gender as well as the effects of nine control variables. We thus conclude that the unique views of conservative white males contribute. Read more
How facts backfire: Researchers discover a surprising threat to democracy: our brains
By Joe Keohane July 11, 2010, Boston Globe
It’s one of the great assumptions underlying modern democracy that an informed citizenry is preferable to an uninformed one. “Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1789. This notion, carried down through the years, underlies everything from humble political pamphlets to presidential debates to the very notion of a free press. Mankind may be crooked timber, as Kant put it, uniquely susceptible to ignorance and misinformation, but it’s an article of faith that knowledge is the best remedy. If people are furnished with the facts, they will be clearer thinkers and better citizens. If they are ignorant, facts will enlighten them. If they are mistaken, facts will set them straight
In the end, truth will out. Won’t it? Read more
The Values of Everything
George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 12th October 2011
Progressive causes are failing: here’s how they could be turned around?
So here we are, forming an orderly queue at the slaughterhouse gate. The punishment of the poor for the errors of the rich, the abandonment of universalism, the dismantling of the shelter the state provides: apart from a few small protests, none of this has yet brought us out fighting
The acceptance of policies which counteract our interests is the pervasive mystery of the 21st Century. In the United States, blue-collar workers angrily demand that they be left without healthcare, and insist that millionaires should pay less tax. In the UK we appear ready to abandon the social progress for which our ancestors risked their lives with barely a mutter of protest. What has happened to us? Read more
Common Cause: The case for working with our cultural values by Tom. Compton Change Strategist at WWF-UK Simplified, the work presented here on values points to a distinction between two broad classes of value: intrinsic or self-transcendent values, and extrinsic or self enhancing values. Intrinsic values include the value placed on a sense of community, affiliation to friends and family, and self-development. Extrinsic values, on the other hand, are values that are contingent upon the perceptions of others – they relate to envy of ‘higher’ social strata, admiration of material wealth, or power. Read more |  |
Cultural Cognition of Scientific Consensus
Dan Kahan et al, Yale Law School
Why do members of the public disagree—sharply and persistently—about facts on which expert scientists largely agree? We designed a study to test a distinctive explanation: the cultural cognition of scientific consensus. The “cultural cognition of risk” refers to the tendency of individuals to form risk perceptions that are congenial to their values. The study presents both correlational and experimental evi-dence confirming that cultural cognition shapes individuals’ beliefs about the existence of scientific con-sensus, and the process by which they form such beliefs, relating to climate change, the disposal of nu-clear wastes, and the effect of permitting concealed possession of handguns. The implications of this dy-namic for science communication and public policy-making are discussed. Read more
The Cultural Cognition Project at Yale Law School
The Second National Risk and Culture Study: Making Sense of—and Making Progress In— the American Culture War of Fact
Cultural Cognition Project at Yale Law School is a group of scholars from Yale and other universities interested in studying how cultural values shape the public’s risk perceptions and related policy beliefs. ..... project members have used the methods of various disci-plines—including social psychology, anthropology, communications, and political science—to chart the impact of this process and to identify the mechanisms through which it operates. The Project also has an explicit normative objective: to identify democratic procedures that enable society to resolve culturally grounded differences in belief in a manner that is both congenial to people of diverse cultural outlooks and consistent with sound public policymaking. Read more
Clumsy Solutions for a Complex World: the case of Climate Change
by Marco Verweij et al
Successful solutions to pressing social ills tend to consist of innovative combinations of a limited set of alternative ways of perceiving and resolving the issues. These contending policy perspectives justify, represent and stem from four different ways of organizing social relations: hierarchy, individualism, egalitarianism and fatalism.
Each of these perspectives: (1) distils certain elements of experience and wisdom that are missed by the others; (2) provides a clear expression of the way in which a significant portion of the populace feels we should live with one another and with nature; and (3) needs all of the others in order to be sustainable. ‘ Clumsy solutions ’ – policies that creatively combine all opposing perspectives on what the problems are and how they should be resolved – are therefore called for. We illustrate these claims for the issue of global warming. Read more
Songs
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References
Climate Change and Mental Health: References for Action here
Psychological barriers
Want to defeat a proposed public policy? Just label supporters as 'extreme'
By Thomas Nelson Ohio State University
COLUMBUS, Ohio – New research shows how support for a generally liked policy can be significantly lowered, simply by associating it with a group seen as "radical" or "extreme."
In one experiment, researchers found that people expressed higher levels of support for a gender equality policy when the supporters were not specified than when the exact same policy was attributed to "radical feminist" supporters. These findings show why attacking political opponents as "extremists" is so popular – and so effective, said Thomas Nelson, co-author of the study and associate professor of political science at Ohio State University.
"The beauty of using this 'extremism' tactic is that you don't have to attack a popular value that you know most people support," Nelson said. "You just have to say that, in this particular case, the supporters are going too far or are too extreme." More
Sleepwalking into disaster: are we in a state of denial about climate change?
by George Marshall
The following paper is based on a talk given in Oxford on 22nd September 2005
For the past four years a British national newspaper, The Independent, has led the way in its championing of climate change as a major issue. A typical issue this year[1] dedicates its entire front cover to a devastating new analysis of climate change by an international task force of scientists. Under the banner ‘Countdown to global catastrophe’ it says: ‘A report warns a point of no return may be reached in ten years, beyond which the world would be irretrievably committed to disastrous changes. These could include widespread agricultural failure, water shortages and major droughts, increased disease, sea level rise and the death of forests- with the added possibility of abrupt catastrophic events such as ‘runaway’ greenhouse global warming, the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, or the switching-off of the Gulf Stream’. News stories don’t come much more apocalyptic than that.
And yet there’s something strange and hollow-sounding about this for once inside the front cover we find that the paper is largely given over to the enthusiastic promotion of the very activities and companies which cause climate change. Read more
Why We Find It So Hard to Act Against Climate Change
Solving the “It’s Not My Problem” problem. A psychologist on what keeps us from coming to terms with the climate crisis.
by George Marshall, Dec 01, 2009
It should be easy to deal with climate change. There is a strong scientific consensus supported by very sound data; consensus across much of the religious and political spectrum and among businesses including the largest corporations in the world. The vast majority of people claim to be concerned. The targets are challenging, but they are achievable with existing technologies, and there would be plentiful profits and employment available for those who took up the challenge.
So why has so little happened? Read more
Rethinking adaptation for a 4°C world
An analysis of psychological strategies for responding to the prospects of severe climate change
Hamilton C. and Kasser T.
Four degrees and beyond, Psychological adaptation to the threats and stresses of a four degree world (Oxford University, Oxford, UK) Environmental Change Institute (2009) Read more
Black and white thinking is simpler!
by Carol Ride, May 2011
Before 2005 I have to admit I was in denial about climate change. Not an active denier or active skeptic, but perhaps representative of the community who don’t want to know or face knowing about climate change.
Deep down I must have known there was a problem... Read more
The Dragons of Inaction: Psychological Barriers That Limit Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation
Robert Gifford, University of Victoria
American Psychologist, May - June 2011
Most people think climate change and sustainability are important problems, but too few global citizens engaged in high-greenhouse-gas-emitting behavior are engaged in enough mitigating behavior to stem the increasing flow of greenhouse gases and other environmental problems. Why is that? Structural barriers such as a climate-averse infrastructure are part of the answer, but psychological barriers also impede behavioral choices that would facilitate mitigation, adaptation, and environmental sustainability. Although many individuals are engaged in some ameliorative action, most could do more, but they are hindered by seven categories of psychological barriers, or “dragons of inaction”: limited cognition about the problem, ideological worldviews that tend to preclude pro-environmental attitudes and behavior, comparisons with key other people, sunk costs and behavioral momentum, discredence toward experts and authorities, perceived risks of change, and positive but inadequate behavior change. Read more
Behavioural Barriers to Effective Climate Change Policy
Dr Carmen Lawrence
With exception of a few recalcitrant deniers, most people now seem to agree that climate change is the poor are likely to suffer most -.‐‑ and we have all contributed to its development -.‐‑ although the wealthy and the wealthy nations are largely responsible for the current state of affairs. By continuing to burn fossil fuels and clear forests we are inevitably worsening the problem.
At the same time as various reports warn us that failure to act will actually cost substantially more than prevention, many politicians, and the voters who elect them, continue to prevaricate or make largely token gestures to solve the problem. Read more
Psychology’s Contributions to Understanding and Addressing Global Climate Change
American Psychologist Special Edition, May- June 2011
Climate change poses one of the greatest challenges facing humanity in this century. This article, which introduces the American Psychologist special issue on global climate change, follows from the report of the American Psychological Association Task Force on the Interface Between Psychology and Global Climate Change. In this article, we place psychological dimensions of climate change within the broader context of human dimensions of climate change by addressing (a) human causes of, consequences of, and responses (adaptation and mitigation) to climate change and (b) the links between these aspects of climate change and cognitive, affective, motivational, interpersonal, and organizational responses and processes.
Characteristics of psychology that cross content domains and that make the field well suited for providing an understanding of climate change and addressing its challenges are highlighted. We also consider ethical imperatives for psychologists’ involvement and provide suggestions for ways to increase psychologists’ contribution to the science of climate change. Read more
Understanding the psychological barriers to climate change action
by Dr Susie Burke, Public Interest, Environment and Disaster Response, Australian Psychological Society
Slowly but surely the word is getting out that psychology does indeed have lots to offer in dealing with climate change. Read more
All in the Mind, ABC Radio National, September 2010
Transcript of Interview with Robert Gifford and Joseph Reser
Only it's not all in the mind it's in the world, it's measurable, it's climate change. And those thousands of scientists who have been doing the measuring channel their peer-reviewed results into the major report cards issued by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC.
Now the IPCC has come under deep scrutiny, not the least for the so-called climategate email scandal last year and now a major independent inquiry of the body was published just this week with calls for a reformed, more transparent organisation. But psychologists would go one step further in their critique. Read more
Behavior change causes changes in beliefs, not vice versa
by David Roberts, staff writer for Grist
There's always been an obsession among climate hawks with polls that measure public acceptance of climate change science. This drives them absolutely batty.
An enormous amount of attention has focused on this metric -- polls, surveys, studies, punditry, and endless elite hand-wringing. The often unstated assumption hiding behind the discussion is that getting people to say they believe in climate change is the top priority for everyone who wants progress on this issue. That's Step 1. If only we could get to Step 2! Read more
Politics and climate change
New Study: Political Elite Shapes Climate Discourse
Keith Kloor, February 9, 2012
Fresh analysis of public opinion presents a vexing challenge for climate communicators.
Climate communicators must be feeling confused. They’ve been advised to talk more about 1) extreme weather, 2) public health, 3) national security, and green tech, to cite just a few of the messaging frames recommended to them in recent years.
They’ve also been advised to widen the scientific conversation; beless boring; show climate scientists at work; make climate data more visceral; personalize climate impacts; and push back harder on disinformation.
Now, a new study led by Drexel University’s Robert Brulle submits that none of this matters as much as what politicians say about climate change:....more
Climate of Denial
By Al Gore (Rolling Stone) - June 22, 2011
The first time I remember hearing the question “is it real?” was when I went as a young boy to see a traveling show put on by “professional wrestlers” one summer evening in the gym of the Forks River Elementary School in Elmwood, Tennessee.
The evidence that it was real was palpable: “They’re really hurting each other! That’s real blood! Look a’there! They can’t fake that!” On the other hand, there was clearly a script (or in today’s language, a “narrative”), with good guys to cheer and bad guys to boo.
But the most unusual and in some ways most interesting character in these dramas was the referee: Whenever the bad guy committed a gross and obvious violation of the “rules” — such as they were — like using a metal folding chair to smack the good guy in the head, the referee always seemed to be preoccupied with one of the cornermen, or looking the other way. Yet whenever the good guy — after absorbing more abuse and unfairness than any reasonable person could tolerate — committed the slightest infraction, the referee was all over him. The answer to the question “Is it real?” seemed connected to the question of whether the referee was somehow confused about his role: Was he too an entertainer? Read more
The Politiciziation of Climate Change and Polarization in the American Public's Views of Global Warming, 2001-2010
by Aaron M. McCright and Riley E. Dunlap, Sociological Quarterly
We examine political polarization over climate change within the American public by analyzing data from 10W nationally representative Gallup Polls between 2001 and 2010. We find that liberals and Democrats are more likely to report beliefs consistent with the scientific consensus and express personal concern about global warming than are conservatives and Republicans. Further, the effects of educational attainment and self-reported understanding on global warming beliefs and concern are positive for liberals and Democrats, but are weaker or negative for conservatives and Republicans. Last, significant ideological and partisan polarization has occurred on the issue of climate change over the past decade. Read more
The Unbearable lightness of Politics: Climate Change Denial and Political Polarization
Robert J. Antonio*University of Kansas and Robert J. Brulle Drexel University
“It’s anti-American and anti-freedom.” (Rand Paul)
Newly elected Republican Senator Paul states succinctly the conservative view of U.S. cooperation with international efforts to stem global warming. Liberals view Paul and friends to be endangering efforts to save the planet. The partisan split, analyzed incisively by McCright and Dunlap (see above), will likely intensify in the wake of the conservative midterm election victories and possible mobilization of the Democratic Party’s progressive wing.
As McCright and Dunlap note, the partisan split over global warming is entwined with a broader polarization that intensified since the late 1990s. We address facets of American political culture that feed this polarization and support McCright and Dunlap’s critique of "reflexive modernity" theories. Read more
Social Science of Climate Change
 The Social Science of Climate Change by Dr John Rolls |
Philosophy and climate change
Ethical Analysis of the Climate Change Disinformation Campaign: Introduction to A Series.
By DONALD A BROWN on January 3, 2012 from The Pennsylvania State University
I. Introduction to The Series:
Over the next few weeks, ClimateEthics will take a deeper look at what has been referred to as the "climate change disinformation campaign" through an ethical lens
This series is based upon the assumption that skepticism in science is essential to increase understanding of the natural world. Yet, ideologically based disinformation is often ethically abhorrent particularly in regard to behaviors about which there is credible scientific support for the conclusion that these activities threaten life and the ecological systems on which life depend. This report focuses on specific tactics that have been deployed in the climate change disinformation campaign. It is not a critique of responsible skepticism. More
Creating a language for our psychoterratic emotions and feelings
Glenn Albrecht Professor of Sustainability, Murdoch University,
I am developing a conceptual framework for understanding psychoterratic, or earth related (terra) mental health (psyche) states or conditions. I want to contribute to an expanded understanding of the changing relationship between the states of biophysical and built environments and human mental and physical health.
Read more Glenn Albrecht discusses many issues that relate emotions, feelings, psychological states and climate change.
