How can I convince you that Global Warming is Happening?
April 18, 2019
In 2013, a study led by scientist John Cook examined nearly 12,000 papers dealing with global warming, and among those that expressed the authors’ stance on the phenomenon, 97% concluded that global warming is happening and is caused, in part, by human activity. Very similar results have been presented by other authors who investigate whether there is scientific consensus on the topic, and how strong it is. Within the expert community, the conclusions that global warming exists and that our activities (especially those that release carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere) have most likely contributed decisively to it are considered true by the overwhelming majority of scientists. Based on this consensus, scientists argue that, without significant changes in our actions, the consequences of rising temperatures on Earth could be disastrous. But one question that remains unanswered is: how can I convince you, my fellow everyday person, that this environmental threat is real?
Paul Van Lange and Brock Bastian discuss this in their article in Scientific American, reminding us that seeking changes in our behaviors — both individual and societal — opens up an even more difficult front of struggle. They argue, in quite naive terms of evolutionary biology, that the evolution of our species has, in a way, rewarded those individuals who were/are able to respond more adequately to immediate threats — which constituted strong selective pressures on our species. This makes perfect sense if we do a brief exercise in evolutionary thinking without having to dive too deeply into it: our survival likely once depended on our ability to flee from predators, to know when to wait and check whether it’s the wind or something lurking behind a bush moving a few meters away, etc. We needed to think and act immediately in order not to fall victim to some predator or other disaster.
We have not abandoned that which ensured our survival in a not-so-distant past. On the contrary, even though some of those selective pressures are apparently no longer acting on us (so strongly, perhaps), we still tend to use our short-term decision-making abilities and to consider only the elements that are “here and now,” within our reach, when we reflect on a given problem.
Lange and Bastian then ask: “How can tangible outcomes, like money, time, and comfort, compete with future and abstract threats like global warming?” Finding answers to this question is no trivial task, but it is possible, and the starting point may lie in psychology.
We understand abstract information in a different way than concrete/immediate information. While the abstract leads us to ponder, imagine, and suppose — but not to act directly — the concrete/immediate denotes a degree of urgency, much more likely to evoke strong feelings such as frustration, empathy, or joy. The authors summarize this issue with the phrase “Small but concrete events can have powerful effects.”
Let us imagine that the company we work for launches a campaign to raise awareness about waste sorting. If we make an effort to properly separate waste at the company, we receive a salary bonus at the end of the week. Now, imagine a second scenario where the company argues that if we sort the waste, we are doing our part to help the planet we live on, and we should sleep happily. A salary bonus seems more appealing to our interests — it is immediate, concrete, and evokes immediate feelings associated with reward. Meanwhile, the action rewarded with recognition of the morality of the act (helping the planet) is abstract; it requires us to engage in exercises of imagination and reflection and is unlikely to have a strong effect on our actions.
Global warming is a very well-documented phenomenon. We can show fluctuations in average global temperature, comparisons with other time periods, CO₂ and methane emissions, changes in ocean water levels, and so on. But showing the story of a polar bear supposedly affected by global warming (even if we can’t say for certain that this is the case) appeals more strongly to people’s need to act.
The authors of the Scientific American article argue that some collective actions, far from being abstract, operate in the “here and now,” and this line of reasoning may offer some answers to the problem we are addressing here.
Tragedy of the Commons
In an article from February of 2019, researchers describe an experiment that helps us understand how people respond to abstract and concrete information. The researchers recruited participants and divided them into groups of six people to play a game involving a shared resource pool — common to all — with 3,000 points that could be acquired through small amounts of money. In each round, participants could take 30 points for themselves, anonymously. The idea was to show that if they took too many points, the resource would be depleted and the game would end abruptly.
The dilemma of the “tragedy of the commons” involves a key point: the best strategy for any player (in this case) is to take more resources from the exhaustible source than what is allowed. In this experiment, the authors defined that half of the participants would be informed that the decision to withdraw points would have an immediate implication for the lives of crickets: the more points they took, the more crickets would die. In other words, instead of participants having to think only about their own actions and perhaps those of the other players, they had a vivid — though symbolic — warning of the harm that taking points could cause. All participants received occasional warnings that the resource was running out, but only half received messages about the crickets’ lives (the others weren’t even aware of the crickets’ existence in the game; they only knew about the economic implications).
As a result, those participants who were aware of the harm caused to the crickets made more sustainable choices and repeated them consistently. Lange and Bastian argue that, based on these findings, showing the consequences of actions that contribute to global warming (such as showing that cutting down a tree in the Amazon leads to the crushing of mammals, birds, reptiles, and even insects; to the removal of their homes and their eventual desperate escape) might activate people’s need to act on the “here and now.”
So, What Can We Do?
Instead of replicating so many graphs and statistics (which are, of course, necessary to support arguments about global warming and to truly understand what is happening), showing the suffering that today’s actions cause may be a way to prompt people to act. We must remember that we want people who are often unfamiliar with certain aspects of science to be aware of a problem that is, in fact, taking place. In India, for example, there are disastrous consequences involving heat waves that are intensified by global warming. Perhaps conducting public awareness campaigns that reveal these concrete, often unknown events to the public is also an important alternative.
My intention here is to raise an important point in the discussion about global warming: we need to bring the issue into people’s reality in a way that doesn’t feel so distant from them. It is necessary to make it possible for current and future generations to gain a clearer understanding of the climate outlook for the coming years, if we do not change the way we live today.
The consensus among scientists is that human actions contribute to the warming of the planet. The burning of fossil fuels, deforestation in tropical areas, and the expansion of agricultural and livestock production are some of the practices that increase the levels of gases such as carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide in the atmosphere. And our actions on the climate are already producing impacts on Earth: with the rise in the average temperature of the atmosphere and the oceans, processes of desertification and melting of polar ice caps are intensifying, and the lives of animals and plants are also being affected (as in the case of migratory birds and insects that now receive environmental cues different from those they evolved with, and thus migrate at times different from when they used to), to name just a few examples.
Although we are capable of making medium- and long-term decisions, as pointed out by Lange and Bastian, the motivation to make them cannot feel too distant from our reality. And beginning to think about how to achieve this may be the first step toward enacting the necessary changes we must face if we truly wish to preserve our planet, our species, and the nature around us.
It is necessary, therefore, to show that the difficulties we will face in the future do not lie in the abstract, but rather in the concrete: the rise in the planet’s temperature will affect our sons and daughters. In addition, awareness efforts must seek dialogue with those sectors of society most actively involved in driving global warming, such as industrial, agricultural, and livestock sectors.
Link to original (In Portuguese)