November 17, 2010 — andyextance

If you can face the sheer volume of evidence for global warming and not become too numbed and overwhelmed to act, you are probably quite an unusual person. That’s one warning offered by University of New South Wales psychologist Ben Newell, who published research back in August discussing how we think about climate change. “We can only worry about a limited set of issues, Newell emphasised in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. That means that when people like me try and communicate the evidence, we must be careful how we do it.

Research at the Centre for Environmental Decision Making at Columbia University has shown that “people remember more and report more willingness to take action when shown vivid imagery, like receding glaciers, than when just given facts and figures,” Newell told Simple Climate. “I think this emphasises the need to engage people with images that they can relate to and easily understand. However, we should avoid inducing ‘despair’ by showing “Day After Tomorrow” type catastrophes. A good method might be to show images of real impacts on local regions that have changed over a specified time period rather than artists’ impressions of what could be.” Interestingly, these findings are also shared by University of California, Berkeley, researchers in the journal Psychological Science set to be published in January.

This is just one small element of the wide range of insights that Newell’s work provides, another aspect of which has already been covered on this blog, and which are summarised overall in the following video:

We all already face plenty of problems in our daily lives, so it’s tempting to believe the arguments that are easier for us to hear, even if they’re inaccurate. Newell wanted to use his understanding to try and help us avoid this. “My motivation grew out of frustration at the rising tide of ‘denialism’ and a desire to give psychology its appropriate place at the centre of the debate,” Newell said. He points out that the link between human behaviour and climate is clear, so the debate should be about how to change our actions to limit adverse climate effects. “Psychology is all about understanding the hows and whys of human behaviour,” he said. “Since the early 80s there has been discussion of how psychology can and should contribute to the debate about climate change – so there is lots of useful information and research out there to draw on.”

Newell’s area of academic specialism is probably the furthest from the direct study of climate change of any scientist to have participated in this blog. However, his work could be very powerful in helping me achieve my aim of providing a simple, easy-to-absorb, explanation of how it works, so I asked him for his help.

“My expertise is in psychology, not climate science, which is why I teamed up with a climate scientist to write the paper on the psychology of global warming,” Newell warned. “With that in mind, here goes: a simple ‘literal’ explanation of climate change is a change in the average pattern of weather over a long period of time; recently the term has become a ‘catch-all’ to describe the impact that the increase in Earth’s temperature – global warming – will have on ecosystems and societies.”

“Climate change also captures the idea that the temperature rise is being driven by human activities which increase CO2 emissions, like burning fossil fuels. CO2 is being emitted into the atmosphere faster than it can be removed by uptake by vegetation. Thus the CO2 remains in the atmosphere and acts like an insulating blanket around the Earth. This ‘thicker blanket’ traps thermal radiation emitted from the land and oceans thereby leading to an increase in the Earth’s average surface temperature.”

He advises anyone who is interested in finding out more to see what respected scientific bodies like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or the Royal Society, or even the Climate Change Research Centre at his own university have to say on the matter.