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Apocalypse fatigue: losing the public on climate change

By Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger - posted Thursday, 26 November 2009


Many observers have suggested that Gore’s leading role in the global warming debate has had much to do with the rising partisan polarisation around the issue. And while this almost certainly has played a part, it is worth considering that there may be other significant psychological dynamics at play as well.

Dr John Jost, a leading political psychologist at New York University, recently demonstrated that much of the partisan divide on global warming can be explained by system justification theory. Calls for economic sacrifice, major changes to our lifestyles, and the immorality of continuing “business as usual” - such as going on about the business of our daily lives in the face of looming ecological catastrophe - are almost tailor-made to trigger system justification among a substantial number of Americans.

Combine these two psychological phenomena - a low sense of imminent threat (what psychologists call low-threat salience) and system justification - and what you get is public opinion that is highly resistant to education or persuasion. Most Americans aren’t alarmed enough to pay much attention, and efforts to raise the volume simply trigger system-justifying responses.

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The lesson of recent years would appear to be that apocalyptic threats - when their impacts are relatively far off in the future, difficult to imagine or visualise, and emanate from everyday activities, not an external and hostile source - are not easily acknowledged and are unlikely to become priority concerns for most people. In fact, the louder and more alarmed climate advocates become in these efforts, the more they polarise the issue, driving away a conservative or moderate for every liberal they recruit to the cause.

These same efforts to increase salience through offering increasingly dire prognosis about the fate of the planet (and humanity) have also probably undermined public confidence in climate science. Rather than galvanising public demand for difficult and far-reaching action, apocalyptic visions of global warming disaster have led many Americans to question the science.

Having been told that climate science demands that we fundamentally change our way of life, many Americans have, not surprisingly, concluded that the problem is not with their lifestyles but with what they’ve been told about the science. And in this they are not entirely wrong, insofar as some prominent climate advocates, in their zeal to promote action, have made representations about the state of climate science that go well beyond any established scientific consensus on the subject, hyping the most dire scenarios and most extreme recent studies, which are often at odds with the consensus of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

These factors predate but appear to have been exacerbated by recession. Pew’s pollster Kohut points to evidence indicating that the recession has led many Americans to prioritise economic over environmental concerns and that this in turn has probably translated into greater scepticism about the scientific basis for environmental action. But notably, both the Pew and Gallup data show that the trend of rising scepticism about climate science and declining concern about global warming significantly predate the financial crisis.

Pew found that from July 2006 to April 2008, prior to the recession, belief that global warming was occurring declined from 79 per cent to 71 per cent and belief that global warming was a very or somewhat serious problem declined from 79 per cent to 73 per cent. Gallup found that the percentage of Americans who believed that news of global warming was exaggerated rose from 30 per cent in March of 2006 to 35 per cent in March of 2008. So while these trends have accelerated over the last 18 months, they were clearly present in prior years.

Perhaps we should give the American public a little more credit. They may not know climate science very well, but they are not going to be muscled into accepting apocalyptic visions about our planetary future - or embracing calls to radically transform “our way of life” - just because environmentalists or climate scientists tell them they must.

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They typically give less credit to expert opinion than do educated elites, and those of us who tend to pay more attention to these questions would do well to remember that expert opinion and indeed, expert consensus, has tended to have a less sterling track record than most of us might like to admit.

At the same time, significant majorities of Americans are still prepared to support reasonable efforts to reduce carbon emissions even if they have their doubts about the science.

They may be disinclined to tell pollsters that the science is settled, just as they are not inclined to tell them that evolution is more than a theory. But that doesn’t stop them from supporting the teaching of evolution in their schools. And it will not stop them from supporting policies to reduce carbon emissions - so long as the costs are reasonable and the benefits, both economic and environmental, are well-defined.

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First published in Yale Environment 360 on November 16, 2009.



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About the Authors

Ted Nordhaus, with Michael Shellenberger, is the co-author of Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility and a recent collection of energy and climate writings, The Emerging Climate Consensus, with a preface by Ross Gelbspan, available for download at www.TheBreakthrough.org.

Michael Shellenberger, with Ted Nordhaus, is the co-author of Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility and a recent collection of energy and climate writings, The Emerging Climate Consensus, with a preface by Ross Gelbspan, available for download at www.TheBreakthrough.org.

Other articles by these Authors

All articles by Ted Nordhaus
All articles by Michael Shellenberger

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

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