In the UK, there is much noise about how the political consensus on climate change has shattered, especially when it comes to ‘net zero’. And indeed, this divergence of opinion has been building over the last months, with newspaper editorials attacking Ed Miliband relentlessly throughout 2024.
But perhaps it’s just the politicians and newspapers who are making the fuss – as there does seem to be either a desire for more climate action across the UK and beyond, or an increase in climate apathy.
This needn’t be contradictory. We might want more to be done about climate change by those same politicians, but we have now come to either be confused and distracted by disinformation and climate anxiety or have just got used to endless climate catastrophe stories and are adjusting to global warming too quickly.
One way ahead might be breaking through climate apathy:
Could direct, visceral loss make climate change feel more vivid to people? [asked Grace Liu of Princeton University]
That question sparked her study, recently published in the journal Nature Human Behavior, that came to a striking conclusion: Boiling down data into a binary — a stark this or that — can help break through apathy about climate change.
The findings suggest that if scientists want to increase public urgency around climate change, they should highlight clear, concrete shifts instead of slow-moving trends. That could include the loss of white Christmases or outdoor summer activities canceled because of wildfire smoke.
The metaphor of the “boiling frog” is sometimes used to describe how people fail to react to gradual changes in the climate… People mentally adjust to temperature increases “disturbingly fast,” according to the study. Previous research has found that as the climate warms, people adjust their sense of what seems normal based on weather from the past two to eight years, a phenomenon known as “shifting baselines.”
The importance of using data visualizations to get an idea across is often overlooked, according to Jennifer Marlon, a senior research scientist at the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. “We know that [data visuals] can be powerful tools for communication, but they often miss their mark, partly because most scientists aren’t trained, despite the availability of many excellent resources,” Marlon said in an email. She said that binary visuals could be used to convey the urgency of addressing climate change, though using them tends to mean losing complexity and richness from the data.
The study’s findings don’t just apply to freezing lakes — global temperatures can be communicated in more stark ways. The popular “climate stripes” visual developed by Ed Hawkins, a professor at the University of Reading in the U.K., illustrates temperature changes with vertical bands of lines, where blue indicates cold years and red indicates warm ones. As the chart switches from deep blue to deep red, it communicates the warming trend on a more visceral level. The stripes simplify a gradual trend into a binary-style image that makes it easier to grasp. “Our study explains why the climate stripes is actually so popular and resonates with people,” Dubey said.
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