When it comes to our response to Climate Change, there are a lot of casual claims about what “people” do and don’t believe, or about what “we” are or are not doing, (“No One is Doing Anything”), including what “humans” are even capable of doing. Throughout my life I’ve spent lots of time with these speculations too. It is especially easy to believe that “we” are locked into some insuperable political impasse underwritten by “the believers” on the one hand (the Democratic-leaning and voting public) vs. “the deniers” on the other (the Republican-leaning and voting public). Such claims are often used to justify increased need for action, including the need to support various organizations to “defeat” the “other side.” However, there is a danger with buying into an over-simplified, us-vs.-them version of reality; it can create a false sense that, based on a long list of other seemingly similar impasses, there is a historical precedence for, and perhaps inevitability of, failure to find resolution.
Fortunately, we have something more powerful than our imaginations to consult about the general societal response to Climate Change, we have information. The Yale Climate Change Communication Group is a group of “social scientists studying the causes and consequences of public opinion and behavior” about Climate Change since before 2005. Led by program director Anthony Leiserowitz, they conduct rigorously structured (Footnote 1), scientific surveys of American’s attitudes regarding Climate Change.
These folks have learned a lot of things, and might represent the most informed group out there about the realities and vagaries of American’s attitudes about Climate Change. The first I heard of them was from Citizen Science friend and colleague, Caren Cooper, referencing “the Six Americas.” The idea, born from the Yale group’s research, was this: We tend to think of the world of Americans as divided roughly in half about Climate Change, but it turns out this is simply not accurate. In actuality, the responses break down into six fairly distinct sets of attitudes in a spectrum of beliefs and corresponding engagement: (1) the truly active Deniers, (2) the more passively Doubtful, (3) the otherwise Disengaged, (4) the again, relatively passive Cautious, (5) the watchful Concerned , and (6) the actively Alarmed. Each group is characterized by different average demographics. (Middle-aged over-educated women like me tend to be alarmed :)
Here’s the summary excerpted from the first report published in 2009:
One of the first rules of effective communication is to “know thy audience.” Climate change public communication and engagement efforts must start with the fundamental recognition that people are different and have different psychological, cultural, and political reasons for acting – or not acting– to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This report identifies Global Warming’s Six Americas: six unique audiences within the American public that each responds to the issue in their own distinct way. The six audiences were identified using a large nationally representative survey of American adults conducted in the fall of 2008. The survey questionnaire included extensive, in-depth measures of the public’s climate change beliefs, attitudes, risk perceptions, motivations, values, policy preferences, behaviors, and underlying barriers to action. The Six Americas are distinguishable on all these dimensions, and display very different levels of engagement with the issue…
The Alarmed (18%) are fully convinced of the reality and seriousness of climate change and are already taking individual, consumer, and political action to address it. The Concerned (33%) – the largest of the six Americas – are also convinced that global warming is happening and a serious problem, but have not yet engaged the issue personally. Three other Americas – the Cautious (19%), the Disengaged (12%) and the Doubtful (11%) – represent different stages of understanding and acceptance of the problem, and none are actively involved. The final America – the Dismissive (7%)– are very sure it is not happening and are actively involved as opponents of a national effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.[Footnote 2]
I think there are three critically important things to take from this (these) studies:
(1) It is not accurate to think 50% of Americans are vehement Climate Change Deniers. Instead, >10% of the American public are steadfast deniers, the rest are less invested or less informed, but not active vehement deniers.
(2) The most recent data report in November of 2018 from the March 2018 survey declared a supermajority of Americans, a full 76%, now believe it is real, and fall in the Cautious, Concerned, and/or Alarmed categories.
Together, (3) these two basic realities add up to some of the best news, perhaps the only good news, I have ever heard about Climate Change. While the news about the physical realities of the changing climate never wavers from getting worse—ice is never melting slower than we think, always faster, oceans are never absorbing less heat energy than we hope, it is always more—there can be good news about people’s understanding and attitudes, and the overall possibility that people could become more actively involved.
As I mentioned above, I believe not only is our go-to simplification about the black and white believer/denier dichotomy inaccurate, it is dangerous. Specifically, if you continue to believe our country is locked in a Dem vs. Republican split, it would be reasonable to assume that while national government-wide intervention to respond to CC is necessary, never-ending, intractable political deadlock is inevitable. It would also be reasonable to write off huge portions of the American voting population who in actuality have not necessarily made up their minds about the issue, or are not otherwise deeply committed to their “denial.” You can imagine how this sort of mistaken reasoning would have the effect of reinforcing the sense of, and likely the reality of, a political divide. For me, it feels like simplifying this demonstrated, real, and complex version of attitudes to an “us vs. them” dichotomy, risks exacerbating the effects of an artificial polarization.
What this also says to me, is that we have a much greater opportunity to shift the American response to Climate Change in the “right” direction than we dared hope. Just think what would happen if you could more seriously mobilize all those Concerned and Alarmed people toward the cause of ameliorating Climate Change? Or if you could show the Disengaged and Cautious how strong the scientific consensus is, and how significant and serious this issue is for their own personal futures?
The reverberations of serious Climate Change action by the United States would reverberate all over the world if we were to lead the way as we should be doing. It would instigate the kinds of changes that could give us all a fighting chance to save human life and more non-human species from extinction.
In other words, a lot of us get it, we are fortunate to live in one of the most influential countries (democracies) in the world, and these are really good things.
And those who don’t “get it” aren’t our enemies, they simply don’t get it. And we can work with that. Truth and ideas can be powerful things.
(Of course, I hear what you are thinking: The challenges of the Trump Administration's take on Climate Change, with its highly unrepresentative "denier" status, is its own world of issues. But for the moment, let's don't let it cloud the water here. It is helpful to keep all the messes separate.)
You’d think with the seriousness and urgency of the issue, all of us who do get it would be humming along in full coordinated and vocal action to change the courses of the various economic freight trains and policy Titanics that are driving us headlong into the colossal (albeit melting) iceberg emerging through the mist.
But for some reason, we are still not there. Like I observed in myself and my friends and colleagues, many of us Alarmed and Concerned, even if we are taking actions, have yet to really start talking about this elephant in the room.
Next, the other “findings” of my research.
FootNote 1: By rigorously structured I mean they take care to survey as diverse and representative a sample of people as they can, in order to assure they are not biasing their results by over representing certain types or groups of people. Also they structure the question on their surveys in such a way that they don’t falsely lead people to certain answers, and they study the ways in which how the questions are asked influence the answers they get, etc.
A perfect example of how important it is to get this right was a story I heard about while I was at Cornell about a study that found, for instance, that if you give cinnamon flavored gum vs. mint flavored gum to people taking a Climate Change survey, you could skew the results of the answers, with spicy hot cinnamon gum chewers expressing more concern about Climate Change relative to cool, refreshing mint gum chewers!
Footnote 2: These percentages are referencing the original survey. The numbers have shifted in subsequent years’ surveys, and can be examined in more detail in this graphic:
Yes! Climate Change must and will follow the same trajectory as social issues that 'flipped' in less than a generation. There IS so much 'evidence' that it's politically impossible, but evidence for the past is not an indicator for the future. Usually only in 'impossible' cases is there enough at stake that people suddenly turn the tide. I love that this article points out how much there is already agreement; we needn't convert people so much as build (super-attractive!) bridges from belief to action for the 76%. This conversation is a great start.
I enjoyed reading this and believe that this is the most productive type of analysis at this point. People are much more complicated than classification as "believers" and "deniers." These particular labels lost their usefulness a long time ago. We need to learn more about us, and we have to be prepared not to like everything we learn.