Global Warming a Tough Sell for the Human Psyche

MALCOLM RITTER,
AP Science Writer

NEW YORK—The Copenhagen talks on climate change were convened with a sense of urgency that many ordinary folks don't share. Why is that?

One big reason: It's hard for people to get excited about a threat that seems far away in space and time, psychologists say.

"It's not in people's faces," said psychologist Robert Gifford of the University of Victoria in British Columbia. "It is in the media, but not in their everyday experience. That's quite a different thing."

The consequences of global warming are seen as occurring in far-off places, he said: "It's happening up in the Arctic or it's happening in Bangladesh, and it's not happening in my backyard." And the slow changes are not as attention-grabbing as a "fast disaster" like an earthquake, he said.

As it happens, those urgent-seeming U.N. talks have bogged down over political differences. But recent surveys suggest that Americans are not exactly consumed by concern over climate change.

In October, the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press said its poll found that only 35 percent of Americans considered global warming to be a very serious problem, a decline from April 2008. Thirty percent called it "somewhat serious."

In a poll by The Associated Press and Stanford University, published this month, more than half said they would not support a "cap-and-trade" program to reduce global warming gases if it raised their energy bills by $10 a month. Cap-and-trade would essentially allow industries to buy and sell the right to pollute.

Some skeptics, of course, cite their own analyses to question whether greenhouse gas emissions are really an urgent problem that needs to be fixed. And their opinions on the Internet have influenced others.

But beyond that, psychologists say, the nature of climate change itself makes it a tough sell for many people.

Janet Swim, a psychology professor at Pennsylvania State University, recalls a conversation from last month with a taxi driver in Cape Town, South Africa.

"I don't think there's climate change," the driver said. "If there was climate change and sea levels were rising, I would have seen it."

He was going by his own experience, said Swim, who studies how people feel about global warming. "People experience weather on a day-to-day basis, and that's how they think about climate change," she said.

In fact, it takes careful analysis of lots of data from lots of places to tease out the signal of global warming, she noted.

Gifford said people tend to attach less importance to future problems than more immediate concerns. That may be a holdover from early days of human evolution, when "things far away didn't matter, things in the future didn't matter. It was whether the tiger or the enemy was just around the corner," he said.

In fact, scientists say global warming's influence is already visible and it could get worse within decades if no action is taken. The average number of heat-wave deaths in Chicago could more than double by 2050, and killer heat waves in Europe could also increase by that time, experts say. Arctic summers may be almost free of sea ice by 2030 or sooner, they say.

Even among people who accept global warming as a serious issue, there are additional psychological barriers to getting them to take significant action against it. Gifford, who studies pro-environmental behavior, calls them the 13 dragons.

Among them:

— Environmental numbness: "OK, climate change. I've heard that one before. Been there, done that."

— A feeling of powerlessness: "Anything I do is just a drop in the bucket."