(This is a metaphor)It seems this would be a totally incomplete science blog if it did not cover (at least once) the issue of global warming. So boom, here it is. I hope you're not surprised to find, however, that I am concerning this post more with social sciences rather than the natural sciences, but for good reason. Recently, in fact, an economist named Ben Ho claimed that it is social scientists like himself who have the power to save humanity from climate change. Upon looking into the matter, I find myself agreeing.
To understand why, we must first consider the threats of global warming. Seas rising by 17 cm in the next century, stronger hurricanes, greater heat waves, deadly diseases spreading, and so on. Are you threatened? I know I am. We know the threats are many, serious, and real, and yet, we find ourselves not acting. Huh. Crazy (I prefer to think 'stupid', but refrain from using this word out of parentheses to seem less confrontational and, too, to mitigate my hypocrisy). This shifts the issues of climate change into the hands of social scientists.
The point being, even withstanding knowledge of the potential dangers of global warming, we swill have to mobilize the community, incite action. We have not done enough yet. Alas, if only humans were the perfectly rational creatures asserted by classical economists. Thus, social economists like Ben Ho are now exploring how human feelings and emotions like altruism and guilt can be utilized to motivate people to reduce their carbon footprint. A term is employed to describe how to steer people into the most rational action: 'choice architecture'. This term relates to the idea that, because the way in which information is conveyed to us alters our response to it, the best 'choice architecture' steers in the direction of behavior that thorough creatures would choose.
So the problem then is that engineers, who are endowed with the most responsibility now in dealing with issues of climate change, treat the problem like a math problem rather than like something that actually involves decision-making by actual people. Frankly, people will not choose the most quantitatively logical decision. Economists and social scientists get this. But rather than tricking people into mindlessly acting to save the environment, considerations must also be made about how to make people behave mindfully. The question is then asked, rather than what prevents us from making bad decisions, what prevents us from making good ones? The answer that was offered Elke Weber, a psychology professor at Columbia cofounder of Columbia’s Center for Research on Environmental Decisions (CRED), is that global warming does not adequately scare us. Global warming is slow, oft presented in statistical and abstract forms, and perceived frequently, too as something occurring far away, both temporally and spatially. Thus, the threat of global warming fails to evoke the adequate emotional response. And such a weak response is not adequate to motivate action. She then suggests that the obvious conclusion is to...well....scare people more. We gotta hit Americans where it hurts to make 'em respond, in other words.
Others, such as David Krantz, a psychologist, too, and codirector of CRED, disagree with this approach, asserting instead that social scientists need to allow people to consciously make the right choices. People, he asserts, approach a problem with far greater seriousness if they play an active role in solving it as opposed to passively receiving information from above. "...people will think long term so long as they are primed to think that way at the right moment (as in the case of families who save for their children’s college education)."
So while there is disagreement, there is fundamental harmony in the belief that climate policies have to employed that get people into the correct mode of thought. Who knows what suggestions what will work. It doesn't hurt to try them all, eh? Thus, a "portfolio" of solutions must be created; we often simply attempt one thing and assume we've fixed the problem. This is referred to in science literature (coined by Weber) as "single-action bias".
Another problem: in communicating the information, it's hard to gather whether the audience (us) gets it or not. A teacher can easily gauge right on the spot whether a student understands the information or not. Not so on such a large and indirect scale. From Yale, Anthony Leiserowitz suggests that the idea of the 'American public' is a misnomer; rather, there are many American publics. He is working alongside climactic researchers (including those at CRED) to design a survey system which effectively builds a feedback system so that "interpretive communities" can be identified. That is, each community will be designated by "its own tendencies and biases, its own preoccupations or blocks; different policies will suit each. “Naysayers” must be engaged differently from “alarmists,” and so forth."
It goes on and on with the potential solutions that are being suggested by social scientists, psychologists, and so on. The point is though, the fate of our environment does not rest solely in the hands of natural scientists, and organizations and policies must be altered accordingly. While we know what to do and the risks of not acting, we don't really know how to go about acting, or even care enough to. So it must be left to natural scientists to figure out what must be done, and then to social scientists to see how it's gonna get done.
Don't know much about global warming? Check out this video for Global Warming 101:
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