Since all of us are in some way the beneficiaries of cheap fossil fuel, tackling climate change is like trying to build a movement against yourself. People perceive – correctly – that their individual actions will not make a decisive difference in the atmospheric concentration of CO2. Scientists say the available time for meaningful action on climate change is about twenty years. Maybe in hundred years, you could change lifestyles enough to matter – but that much time is not available.
‘How is it possible, when presented with overwhelming evidence, even the evidence of our own eyes, that we can deliberately ignore something — while being entirely aware that this is what we are doing?’ This is the question that George Marshall explores in his book Don't Even Think About It. He concludes that if the weather extremes continue to intensify, the experience of coping with loss and anxiety will make people push it aside as something that they would rather not think about.
Every article on climate change attracts angry comments in social media. Experiments have shown that the insertion of aggressive comments do nothing to change people’s views but makes them hold on more firmly to the view they already hold. Climate change also lacks any readily identifiable external enemy or motive, has dispersed responsibility and diffused impacts. Daniel Gilbert, a professor of psychology at Harvard, argues that our long psychological evolution has prepared us to respond strongly to four key triggers that he denotes with the acronym PAIN:
Personal: Our brains are most highly attuned to identifying friends, enemies, defectors, and human agency.
Abrupt: We are most sensitive to sudden relative changes and tend to ignore slow-moving threats.
Immoral: We respond to things that we find to be indecent, impious, repulsive, or disgusting.
Now: Our ability to look into the future
Gilbert says, the problem with climate change is that it doesn’t trigger any of these. Of the four, he emphasizes the lack of Abrupt and Now. If our emotional circuitry perceives an immediate threat it will flood us with hormones which ready us to hit or run. But this does not happen if we hear of potential dangers that might emerge in years or centuries to come. Persuading people that there’s an odourless, tasteless, invisible gas that’s gathering in the heavens and capturing the sun’s heat because of what man does in using fossil fuels doesn't trigger any of these emotional circuits.
Unless you live in the Maldives or Bangladesh, the threat seems far away. If the pace of global warming were accelerated to a few years instead of over centuries, people would pay more attention. Gilbert cautions us not to underestimate the importance of Immoral. While we recognise that climate change is bad, it does not make us feel noxious or disgraced. He adds, “If global warming were caused by eating puppies, millions of Americans would be massing in the streets.”
We have two distinct information processing systems. One is analytical, logical, and can make sense of abstract symbols, words, and numbers. The other is driven by emotions (especially fear and anxiety), images, intuition, and experience. The analytic system is slow and deliberative, rationally weighing the evidence and probabilities, the emotional system is automatic, impulsive, and quick to apply mental shortcuts so that it can quickly reach conclusions.
Actually the most comprehensive, complex science shows the reality of climate change. But it is addressed to the analytical part of the brain; to people who are not wired to realise the dangers. Climate change will come over a long time horizon that we can’t see, so it’s hard to convince people. Threats to the global systems that support human life are too macro or micro for us to notice directly. So when we are faced with news of these global threats, our attention circuits get bored.
Our perception of risk is dominated by our emotional brain. It favours proximity, draws on personal experience, and deals with images and stories that speak to existing values. The theories, graphs, projects, and data that scientists rely on speak almost entirely to the rational brain. That helps us to evaluate the evidence and, for most people, to recognise that there is a major problem. But it does not spur us to action.
The psychologists Kahneman and Tversky found that people are consistently far more averse to losses than gains, are far more sensitive to short-term costs than long-term costs, and privilege certainty over uncertainty. Kahneman sees climate change as a near perfect lineup of these biases and is not very optimistic. He says that to mobilise people, this has to become an emotional issue. The second problem is that dealing with climate change requires that people accept certain short-term costs and reductions in their living standards to avoid higher but uncertain losses that are far in the future. He says:
No amount of psychological awareness will overcome people’s reluctance to lower their standard of living. So that’s my bottom line: There is not much hope. I’m thoroughly pessimistic. I’m sorry.
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