Climate Change: The distortion between Public Opinion and Science
It is 2019 and the acid rain is pouring across the smog filled streets of Los Angeles, streaming down and washing the facades of the sky scrapers. The sunrays no longer cast their glow upon the city scape, leaving the crowded neighborhoods in darkness and anxiety. A Coca-Cola LED billboard stands as a source of light and alleviation.
This landscape portrayed in the movie Blade Runner, released in 1982, strikes resemblance with the trajectory the world has been following towards environmental degradation.
In 2014 Beijing's 'air-masked residents' installed commercial television screens across the city that enable them to watch virtual sunrises as the thick smog was depriving them from access to sunlight.
The 2017 State of Air report published by the American Lung Association deemed Los Angeles as the city with the worst ozone pollution and ranked it the 5th for particle pollution.
Hollywood seems to notice and mirror the reality of climate change. According to an analysis conducted by a team at Mashable, the number of natural disaster movies deeming climate change as caused by humans, have evened out in the last five years. Although there are not many climate change movies, there had been an increase in the number of movies in the last five years.
Cinema is one communication medium that can effectively shape the public’s perception: finds basis for an in depth understanding of what is at stake, and prompts more climate friendly decision-making and behaviours. However, the battle against climate change should be vigorously fought at policy level.
The efforts of the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC) to report regular assessments of the state of climate has strengthened scientific consensus on the matter. However, some policy makers retain a dose of scepticism and reject initiatives to tackle this threat, while public opinion continues to neglect it.
Last year, the U.S. was confronted with three tornado outbreaks, historic flooding levels, wildfires enhanced by the preceding drought conditions and three category 4 hurricanes. These made the number of deaths grow to 362 and CPI adjusted estimated costs worth 291.3 billion dollars.
Despite the current landscape, United States president, Donald Trump, decided that the best course of action would be to cease participation in the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change mitigation.
In practice, this means that by 2100 the projected global temperature increase will reach 3.2 °C above pre-industrial levels, up from last year’s 2.8°C due to the withdrawal of U.S. from its’ 2025 target and 2050 long-term goal, according to Climate Action Tracker.
“The bottom line is that the NDCs have deteriorated by about .3 degrees, they are .3 degrees warmer than our last assessment, principally due to the effects of the United States, the Trump effect, if you may put it that way and the removal from our assessment from Russia’s long-term pledge,” said Bill Clare, climate change analyst, during the United Nations climate change conference in Fiji, this autumn.
On this matter, public opinion seems to mirror the stance of their elected leader.
In 2016, the Pew Research Center projected that nearly half of U.S. adults claim the Earth’s warming stems from natural causes or that there is no evidence of warming.
In case of a terror threat social media floods with comments, arguments and reactions. People are fast to point out the weaknesses of defence units, to criticise procedures and demand justice. The prospect of increased wildfires, droughts, desertification of land, increased duration and intensity of tropical storms flooding leading to soil erosion does not seem to catalyse the same attention.
Why is public opinion passive?
To find out more about this, I spoke to Dr. Marie Juanchich, a risk communication researcher and lecturer at the University of Essex. She believes this is because terrorism and climate change do not provide the same sense of threat. The consequences of climate change are not perceived by people as negative as the consequences of terrorism.
The adverse effects of environmental degradation on health, food supplies, infrastructure are perceived to happen far out in the future, creating a sort of psychological distance.
“The majority of people think climate change will happen in 100 years and that it will take place in Africa,” said Marie during the interview.
The media bridges the gap between the scientific community and the lay people. It is often hard for people to penetrate the scholar bubble without any background knowledge or a good command of the scientific language.
Currently, the ability of the press to sway people’s attention towards a deeper understanding of the consequences of climate change has been questioned.
Climate science academics such as Maxwell Boykoff have criticised the media for understating what is at stake, distorting scientific evidence and giving voice to groups of climate change doubters.
Several studies conducted by social science scholars revealed three basic distortions used in media coverage of the topic- scientific errors, focus on capturing the attention of the public rather than informing it and an unbalanced coverage.
Scientists Eleanor Siegel and Phyllis Endreny are two of the social scientists concerned with investigating this matter.
“This selective concern with danger is powerfully shaped by the media, whose coverage of potentially hazardous events is governed more by a need to excite the public than to inform it,” they argued in their book called Reporting on Risk.
The reason why the media is failing is that people received mixed messages about climate change,” said Marie Juanchich.
Marie argues that diverting media coverage away from biased views and distortions of scientific facts and reducing uncertainty of scientific predictions can improve public perception of information.
“Because the media portrays these adversarial confrontations they like to invite someone who is sceptical about climate change and someone who is not sceptical and therefore people are split, and it really does not highlight the strong consensus that there is about climate change,” said Marie.
What is the role of communication in policy making?
One major difference between lay people and policy specialists stands in the accuracy, preciseness and reliability of the information available to them.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the international body for assessing the science related to climate change. The IPCC was set up in 1988 to provide policymakers with regular assessments of the scientific basis of climate change, its impacts and future risks, and options for adaptation and mitigation. IPCC assessments are written by hundreds of expert scientists and go through multiple review rounds before being published.
At this point, misinformation is ruled out, but those in charge of mitigation are subject to perceptual limitations as much as the public opinion.
Even at such degree of scrutiny, perception errors emerge and can impact the way actions are taken. Human thinking feeds on biases and heuristics even when information is largely available.
Climate change is currently the biggest threat humanity is facing and according to the IPCC, the design of climate change policies is influenced by how individuals and organizations perceive risks and uncertainties and take them into account.
“People often utilize simplified decision rules such as preference for the status quo,” according to the latest IPCC AR5 report.
Climate science is a field which works with uncertainty. Most often, predictions of future scenarios are not quantifiable and providing exact numbers would be inaccurate. IPCC provides a probabilistic scale in the form of verbal probabilities such as ‘It is unlikely’ or ‘It is very likely’.
Studies of risk communication showed that the use of negative probabilistic words (unlikely) to express the likelihood of an event can affect how uncertainties are interpreted. The negative component of the word (un)biases people to make associations with the event not occuring.
Another problem is that people interpret these probabilities differently from one another. Being a climate change denier can make one grasp the meaning of ‘unlikely’ differently compared to a climate change advocate.
Marie Juanchich and Miroslav Sirota, researchers at the University of Essex, in collaboration with professor of climate change and meteorologist, Theodore Shepard, are working on tailoring the current IPCC scale. They proposed an alternative for conveying the probabilities while wording them positively.
“The positive framing stresses the possibility that the outcome would happen. In terms of policy-making the idea is that people take climate change a bit more seriously and take more preventive measures at international level to remedy the consequences,” said Marie.
In a series of three experiments they measured the effect of the alternative scale and found that participants were more willing to accept evidence in favour of the event occurrence and were inclined to take more cautious decisions and preventive actions.
They believe that in a climate change context it is better to engage with mitigation even if an event does not happen.
“For example, the cost of increasing the size of dams even if no flood would happen is smaller than what people would lose if a flood happened and a lot of properties would be damaged.” Marie added.
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