Why are we so slow to act in response to the threat of climate change?

By: David Walker, Executive Officer

In Australia, 75% of voters believe that climate change is a major problem and support government action to introduce energy efficiency, clean electricity generation and motor vehicle emissions reductions. The Lowy Institute poll of 2007 found that Australians rated tackling climate change as the third most important issue confronting Australia, after improving education and health.

My article last week looked at some possible explanations for the apparently high proportion of rural residents who announce that they are climate change sceptics or deniers. One of those explanations was that we are used to varying seasons, our ”droughts and flooding rains”, and that there’s nothing new happening. 

Unfortunately the trends in temperature seem to be generally headed upward, and are not ‘just variability’.

A further explanation as to why so many of us can’t come to grips with global warming is canvassed in a second article in the eConnect newsletter that I referred to last week. 

Harvard Professor Dan Gilbert suggests that global warming/climate change is not obvious or immediate enough to cause fear. In a recent speech, he said

"Scientists lament the fact that global warming is happening so fast. The fact is it's not happening fast enough”.

Gilbert is not saying that climate change is slow, nor does he want to see the world slide quickly into environmental catastrophe. However he has some understanding of why people with the capacity to act, including leaders in Canberra and elsewhere, appear hamstrung when faced with the enormity of the threat of climatic disaster.

He suggests that we are ill-equipped to respond to global warming because it does not trigger our brain’s threat alarms.

Why? Because global warming lacks four features:

• It does not have a face. Humans are social beings with brains that are highly specialised for thinking about other people and their intentions. 
• It doesn’t violate our morals. Our brains respond to violations of moral rules by generating feelings of disgust and revulsion – feelings that compel us to act.
• It is a threat to our future, but not our present. Our brains have evolved to be very good at responding to immediate threats, but our ability to look into the future and take action against threats that don’t yet exist is new.
• It is a gradual change. Our brains are sensitive to relative, not absolute, changes. When the rate of change is slow enough, it goes undetected.

In short, Gilbert says that we have adapted to respond to threats that are personal, abrupt, immoral and ‘now’. Because global warming doesn’t push any of these buttons, it is a deadly threat that fails to trigger the brain’s alarm and ‘leaves us sleeping in a burning bed’.

eConnect suggest that in communicating about climate change, it is important to keep these challenges in mind and focus on how we can use what we know about how the brain works to get people to change their behaviour, rather than just educating them about the threat.

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