Why climate change fades into the background – and how to change that

For a long time, many climatologists and defenders have maintained an optimistic belief: when the impacts of global warming have become undeniable, people and governments would finally act decisively. Perhaps a devastating hurricane, a heat wave or a flood – or even a cascade of disasters – would make the seriousness of the problem impossible to ignore, stimulating a large -scale action. However, even if disasters go up, climate change remains low on the priority lists of voters and political responses are lukewarm.

This generalized inaction is often attributed to political or structural forces. But decades of psychological research suggest that something deeper is at stake: the human brain tends to ignore slow and crawling change.

While many regions are faced with serious extreme climates, most of the world, climate change appears as a slow and progressive change in daily weather.

This subtlety is a problem. People judge the problem largely via a personal experience: we are more worried by an unusually hot day, and less when the weather is normal. But as things gradually aggravate, our feeling of “normal” moves quietly. This is known as the bubbling frog effect – where subtle and incremental changes fail to trigger an alarm, causing apathy despite the worsening of the conditions: like a frog in a pan of warming water slowly.

In 2020, we were looking for climatic impacts in Princeton, New Jersey. The region does not face forest fires or droughts, but we realized that it had lost something: winter ice skating. For decades, you can skate on Lake Carnegie each year. Now he rarely freezes.

Thanks to conversations with long -term residents and digging in local newspaper archives, we discovered that there had been a sharp drop in ice skating on the lake during the last century and a feeling of loss over it. This interruption of a winter tradition suddenly made climate change in Princeton feel real. Tangible. Staff.

This led us to ask us: binary climatic data – yes or not indicators such as “Lake frozen” vs “no frost” – make people sit and take note better than graphics showing a gradual increase in temperature?

We tested this idea in a series of experiences. The participants were shown one of the two graphs: one displayed increasing winter temperatures of a fictitious city; The other has shown if its lake was relied every year. Above all, the two graphics captured the same underlying climate trend. But people’s answers were very different.

People who saw binary graphics “frozen or not” constantly perceived climate change as having a greater impact than those who saw the temperature graphics. In monitoring studies with lakes in North America and Europe, we have seen the same result. When climatic impacts were presented in this type of black and white terms, people took them more seriously.

For what? We found that binary data creates an illusion of sudden changes. When people saw a series of winters when the lake frozen, followed by years when he did not do it, they perceived a “before” and “after” clear, even if the change was progressive.

Climate change is not only a physical crisis. It is also a psychological problem. And unless we communicate it in a real way, we risk listening to the warning panels until it is too late.

We hope that these results will encourage decision -makers, journalists and educators to take action. Underline the concrete losses that people can refer: winters without ice skating, harvests damaged by drought, summers filled with forest smoke. Use visuals that contrast “what we had” with “what we lost”.

Let people see what has changed – not just the slope of a line.

Grace Liu is at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania and Bought Dubey is at UCLA