Joe: Hello, and welcome to Communicating Climate Change, a series of conversations with social scientists whose research focuses on communicating with the public. I'm Joe Cone with the Oregon Sea Grant program at Oregon State University.
The goal of this series is to provide insights from social science to those who are out on the front lines, communicating with the public about climate. That includes a range of professionals, including meteorologists, government agency personnel, university outreach specialists, and spokes-persons for non-governmental organizations.
Today's conversation is with Dr. Anthony Leiserowitz, a research scientist at the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale University, and the director of the Yale Project on Climate Change. Tony studies public risk perception and decision-making and is particularly interested in how the public perceives different kinds of risk. In recent years his research has concentrated on risk perceptions and climate change. He got his start in this field as a result of four years spent on the staff of the Aspen Global Change Institute, in Colorado.
Tony, tell us about how that experience influenced you.
Tony: This was a really unique place. . . . and what we did is we held interdisciplinary conferences devoted to global environmental issues. So, climate change, biodiversity extinctions, the ozone hole.
And we would bring scientists from the around the world to Aspen for two weeks at a time where they would live together, talk to each other, and so on, around these issues but in an interdisciplinary way. So we would get an atmospheric chemist talking to a ... a modeler, or talking to, you know, someone managing park land and see how, in fact, they had to talk about, or understand each other's perspectives to really make sense of these global environmental problems.
Out of that experience, I was just ... I mean, I spent four years learning at the knee of some of the world's greatest environmental scientists. And they were fantastic people, and I learned so much. And it changed my life. But ultimately I came at that with a background in the social sciences, and so I was always ... I had ... I was increasingly getting a little frustrated, because I saw, O.K., we have this problem, climate change and ozone depletion and biodiversity loss, and so on and so on. What's the common pattern to all these is us, human beings, and so I got very, very interested in, well, what is it about human beings that lead us into these kinds of problems in the first place?
Joe: And that ultimately brought you, you were telling me, to studying risk. How fundamental in any behavior is a perception of risk?
Tony: I ... I have to admit, when I came upon this field of risk and decision-making, what is that? I quickly came to realize, however, that risk underlies all the important decisions we make in our lives. And it's not just environmental risks; it's technological risks, it's health risks, it's the financial risks we take -- do I invest in this stock or this stock. Relationship risks -- do I get married to this person or not, that's a risk. The important decisions are the ones where you don't really know what's going to happen and you have to try to judge. What's the likelihood and ... and consequences of the action I'm gonna take, for good or for bad?
Joe: So, wherever uncertainty is a factor, then a calculation about risk will be required?
Tony: Where we have great trouble as society and as individuals making decisions is on those things that we're not really sure what's going to happen and we have to somehow reach a conclusion. Now, that doesn't mean, however, that we do that in a quote/unquote "rational deliberate fashion." There's a lot of different ways that we make decisions, ranging from evacuation behavior in a hurricane to decisions about what kinds of policies we want to support for climate change to what kinds of decisions ... who are you gonna vote for, for president. All of these are ... are calculated decisions.
Joe: Why and in what circumstances should a professional communicator want to find out more about the risk perceptions of his audience?
Tony: Well, it depends on exactly what it is you're trying to communicate. You know, if you're trying to talk and educate people about a hazard, then it's obviously very important that you understand what they currently understand about that hazard. And that isn't just simply their ... the knowledge that they have about that hazard, but how do they feel about that hazard. Um, what kinds of images come to their mind when they think about that hazard? Because in most cases, for most hazards that we deal with, people's actual factual knowledge about them is relatively limited. And so they're drawing on other sources of information that they hold in their minds, as well as from around ... the people around them. So, we also draw great cues from people around us.
And a great example of that is we've all had the experience of, say, wanting to buy a new car, , and doing lots and lots of research and looking at all the consumer reports and gas mileage and features, and so on and so on. And, thinking that you've got the ... the exact vehicle you want, then asking your cousin saying, oh, I'm thinking about buying this car. And they say, oh gosh! You know, a friend of mine bought one of those and it was a lemon. And suddenly all that research often gets thrown out the window because you've gotten an anecdote from somebody else and ... somebody you trust. That's also a hugely important factor.
. . . it's also what our social networks have to say about the risk as well that become very important. And, in fact, you know, our ... our own closest friends and family and neighbors are often far more trusted as sources of information than unknown government officials , or risk communicators who I've never met before.
Joe: You know, often communicators, whether they work for public agencies, universities, or elsewhere, will think that they need to quote "get the word out" -- give some information about something to a particular audience. And, that information alone will be sufficient to cause the audience to change a behavior in a desired direction. Is that true?
Tony: There's been enormous amounts of climate change science communicated to the public. And yet what we know is that there's a wide diversity of ways that the public perceive that ... that scientific information. Not everyone trusts scientists, and that's an important and critical fact -- that it's not just the message, it's also the messenger. And for some people, they're gonna be ... you know, when a scientist speaks they are ready to ... to listen and to follow what a scientist suggests. Other people not at all -- and in part that may be because of prior experiences with the scientific world.
One example that I found in my own research: one of the primary sources, or groups of people who are very suspicious of the climate change issue are the religious right. O.K. ? Now there are a lot of reasons for that, but one of them is that they don't trust scientists. Now why don't they often trust scientists? Because they have been involved in a longstanding debate over creationism versus evolution, and so, you ... it's very difficult for them; they often just lump all scientists into a single category. This is what scientists are like. . .
Joe: My guess is that even though scientists may be treated with suspicion by some groups, you're not suggesting that scientists ought not venture out into public?
Tony: I think there's a dawning recognition within the scientific community that they ... that they need to speak up, especially when it comes to, again, global environmental changes where the things that they are studying are literally changing right underneath them. Um, in fact, I talked to a lot ecologists who ... who are struggling with this, because on the one hand they want to do their science; they just want to study ecosystems and understand how they work. But at the same time, they're disappearing, literally right from underneath them.
And you know, we are now confronted with such enormous global challenges that it's difficult to ... to see science remaining in its traditional, we only do science and we ... and we'd never speak to the potential impacts or ... or to state, by any means, any sense of the urgency, of what we're seeing. I think that has dramatically shifted within the scientific community.
At the same time, not all scientists need to be public figures. And that needs to be said. Most scientists, I think, are perfectly content and perfectly happy to do what . . . what they do. Um, but at the same time they shouldn't penalize those scientists that do feel impelled and have the skill to actually go out and engage the public, engage stakeholders, go on television or ... or in the media, because it's crucial. It's absolutely critical that we have these ambassadors from our respective fields, um, helping to communicate these issues to the public.
Joe: We've been talking with Tony Leiserowitz of the Yale Project on Climate Change. We've focused a good deal on the messenger of a communication, and how perceptions about the messenger can affect the reception of the message.
When the message is about a scientific finding, though, many communicators appear to believe that this puts the message into a different category, and that providing the best science-based information ought to be sufficient to change people's understanding and then actions. I suppose the underlying assumption is that people make decisions based on reason and through some analytical process. Tony, what does social science research have to say about this?
Tony: Well, over the past say fifty years my own field, which is called judgment decision-making, has largely focused its attention on how people make rational, logical, deliberate decisions. Um, and in particular how do people make mistakes when they ... Even when they're trying to be rational, how do they often make mistakes, through heuristics or shortcuts and ... and so on?
Only in the past ten to fifteen years, however, have we come to realize that there's a whole 'nother side, whole 'nother way that human beings process information and make decisions. so there's this one side is what we call the analytic system, and it's what we learn to do in university setting or in school. The other side is this experiential side, which is the realm of feeling and emotion, imagery, values, narrative, etcetera. And when you look at it from an evolutionary standpoint, that system is far, far older and is incredibly important to the survival of our species of over many many millions of years.
The ability to do rational logical thought is very difficult. It takes a lot of energy. And most of us are what we call cognitive misers. We try to use or try to think intensively as little as possible, because it takes a lot of time and energy. So that's why habit and routine become so important. You'll spend a lot of time thinking about something when you're just about to adopt a new behavior, but then you want to rout ... routinize it. You want to make it habitual. You don't want to have to think about it anymore. Um, and so we all go through this process.
And, in my field, what we have just come to realize is that this experiential side, which again is feelings, emotions. It's often drawn from experience. It ... it's not logical chains of ... of ... um, of thought as much as associations, leaps of associations. It turns out to be incredibly important, and my own work has found that in some ways it's far more important in terms of how people deal with climate change and how they think about climate change. Because, again, overall factual knowledge in, say, climate literacy is quite low among the American public. And so in a situation where people don't really know very much about that issue or any other scientific issue that you happen to be concerned with, um, they're going to rely on these other impressions, feelings, images, etcetera, that they ... that they have.
Joe: So, practically speaking, what are the best things that professional communicators can do to help Americans respond to climate change?
Tony: We have to help them understand that climate change is not a ... a temporally distant problem. It's happening here and now. And I think that's where learning about what's happening in places like Alaska, I think is really important. And it's not just Alaska anymore. Of course, we're seeing these kinds of impacts happening all across the lower forty-eight [states] as well. Um, and if not directly caused by climate change, they're certainly harbingers of what we're likely to see. So, , they're ... they're great teachable moments to help people understand what this may look like in twenty years.
Um, secondly, however, is about bringing it down to home. Um, this issue has been talked about as global climate change, global warming. And, fundamentally what ... I mean, this goes back to what former Speaker of the House Tip O'Neil was very famous for saying is that "all politics is local." And overwhelmingly people are interested in their own communities, their own neighborhoods, their own cities and towns, their own friends and family.
. . . What are the local impacts going to be? And how may my community be at risk? And what kinds of things should we be thinking about as we go forward?
Joe: Do you think that Americans are capable collectively of responding to the risks -- including the changing risks -- that climate change presents?
Tony: . . . there's a wonderful example that Stephen Schneider, the great, ... , climate scientist often gives, and that is, how many people in the room have ever experienced a traumatic fire in their house? And, you know, in a room of two hundred, three hundred people, maybe a half dozen people raise their hands. And then he'll say, O.K., how many of you have fire insurance? And everybody's hand goes up. And he'll say, you're fools. You know, why are you spending and blowing your money on fire insurance when you've never had a fire?
It's because we protect ourselves against uncertain futures. This is what risk and the insurance industry is all about, is about protecting us against uncertainty. And he argues -- and I think he's absolutely right -- that we need to think of issues like climate change as an insurance problem. We don't know, and we will never know exactly what the impacts are going to be. We know ... have some very good understandings of the likely directions and some of the broad scale kinds of problems we may encounter. We also know that there will be surprises, because this is a highly complex, interrelated, positive feed ... and negative feedback system. There is a level of ... of, um, uncertainty in it that is just inherent in the problem. I'm talking about the climate system of the planet. So, it ... we will never have absolute certainty, but we've never required absolute certainty for so many of the other things that we make decisions about, including financial risk, and again, including relationship risk. I mean, we all make decisions in our everyday lives that don't require absolute certainty before acting.
Joe: What positive steps do you see occurring in the U.S. to respond to climate change on a significant scale?
Tony:. We just organized here at Yale a national conversation on climate action. Where we organized seventy cities and mayors across the county to each hold local town halls to discuss the causes, consequences and potential solutions to climate change at their local level. There's enormous hunger at the local level. I think it's now over 250 to 350 mayors have all agreed to start reducing their own greenhouse emission. Um, so there's tremendous action happening at the local level on this issue.
Secondly, one of the major things that we've seen happen over the past year and a half is major companies now getting involved with the climate issue. And, that's for a variety of reasons. It's not just altruism, though some of them are. . . some executives are certainly driven by ... you know, they have children and grandchildren too. But it's also about green. And it's about business risk. Either the risk directly of potential climate change impacts ... I mean, if you're a silicon chip producer, you need plentiful clean water. Well, if you live in the Pacific Northwest and there are projections that snow pack may be reduced by a third to a half, that's a big issue. Your whole facility is potentially at risk.
And then the other side is that there's enormous profit to be made in coming up with the solutions. And somebody is gonna make that money. You know, the classic example is British Petroleum, who changed their name to now BP -- Beyond Petroleum. They want to be known as an energy company, not an oil company. That's not to say they're not still an oil company, but they are at least thinking ahead and thinking ... they're investing enormous amounts of money in renewable energy, as an example. And we're finding in industry after industry, company after company, really serious efforts now being undertaken to reduce their greenhouse gases and to come up with the solutions.
Joe: Right. Some say the business opportunities in responding to climate change are unprecedented.
Tony: We are talking about changing the energy foundations of modern civilization. Everything that we do, the buildings we live in, the cars we drive, the food we eat, the orange juice you may have had for breakfast, the clothes you're wearing, are all fundamentally infused at some point in their production with fossil fuel use. From the mining to the farming to the nitrogen poured on the ... on the ground, etcetera, etcetera. And so, we're talking about having to re-engineer the entire global economy to a non-carbon future. That is an enormous task. And yet, it presents enormous profitable opportunities. And that's why some of the world's largest companies are scrambling and moving very, very fast and investing literally billions of dollars into trying to find those solutions. Because that's ultimately what we're gonna have to do.
Joe: These comments about how business is becoming involved addressing the climate problem, partly because of its own intrinsic interest, of course suggests that other groups will also have their own motivations. How do you motivate those who are, for example, really reluctant?
Tony: There is a group of what we'll call naysayers who simply
believe that climate change is either not happening, , it's not human caused,
just hasn't been proven yet, is, , hype, you know, media hype or, , my personal
favorite are the conspiracy theorists who thinks it's ... it's a hoax. It's
being ... it's a bunch of facts made up by scientists to ... for their
own job security.
What's interesting
about this group when we've done subsequent research is that we find that there's
actually two groups within that naysayer group. They're both white, male,
conservative republican men. One is highly religious; the other is not.
O.K.? So they agree about things like climate change. They completely disagree about things like abortion. O.K.? , now each of them bring a very different set of values and world views to this issue. And as a result, if you were ... let's say you wanted to try to communicate to them, ... you ... you know, saying, we need to save polar bears may not be the most effective approach. Saying that we need to do this because it was ... it's part of our stewardship ethic. It was commanded by God in Genesis that we must till and tend the garden, and we're not doing a very good job of it.
Or alternatively, as good Christians our ... we have a fundamental moral obligation to help the poor and the needy. Many churches spend enormous amounts of time going over and helping people in destitute circumstances around the world. How can we in good conscience ignore a problem that's probably going to push millions more people into those exact dire circumstances? As good Christians our ... we have a fundamental moral obligation to help the poor and the needy.
Now that's a set of arguments that resonates with that particular audience. But you would never hear people ... or you would rarely hear that argument, particularly a Christian argument, in say a scientific conference. O.K. And that's the point, is that they are different folks. And, you know, each of them, , probably come to the issue with a very different perspective. And as I like to say, there are many roads to Damascus. You know, not everyone is going to come to the conclusion that you're hoping that they'll come to, in the same way.
Joe: What's interesting about this example is that this religious motivation sounds high-minded and intellectual. A church teaching. But my guess is that when people act on the principle of helping the needy, they're also motivated by a deep feeling -- a feeling of empathy which gives rise to a desire to not let others suffer if you can help it.
Are you hopeful that we'll collectively get motivated around the changing climate in sufficient time so as to be successful and avoid a lot of human suffering?
Tony: I think we do need to get ready for the kinds of impacts that are basically already locked in. We will be dealing with climate change. Our children will be dealing with climate change. We need to start thinking now about how do we per ... how do we protect ourselves? How do we make ourselves, um, more able to adapt to things that are likely to happen?
At the same time there's a huge difference between crashing into a wall at ten miles an hour and crashing into a wall at fifty-five miles an hour. And so, the actions that we take right now to put the brakes on this runaway greenhouse effect are really crucial. And I think what makes me most hopeful is that there's tremendous energy happening all over the world, right now, on this issue.
I mean, it's hard to find an issue where you find such strong universal concern about an issue where the global public and the United States public want their leaders to do something. They may not know what that something is, but they know that they want them to do something. Lead ... Political leaders have the American and global public's permission to do something.
I think ... you know, like most major social transformations in this country, it's ultimately gonna require a coming together of a lot of different interests.
I mean, it happened with the civil rights movement, happened with the antiwar movement in the sixties, it happened with the women's movement, is that it wasn't just women and it wasn't just minorities. It was faith groups and students and unions, and so on and so on, until enough people came together to say, we need and demand change that it ... it became possible.
Joe: That coming together of many interests is admittedly powerful. What do you see as the key variables in the social response to this issue?
Tony: Ultimately we will respond. Ultimately we will, because nature bats last. We may want to ignore it and deny it and to procrastinate and say, no, we're ... just can't do it. It's too expensive, or we don't know, or there's too much uncertainty, and so on, like we've talked about. But ultimately we're gonna keep getting hit up side the head with two by fours. You know, we will get more extreme level events; you know, whether it be Katrinas or heat waves or the drought that's gripping this country right now. Species will continue to go extinct at alarming rates. You know, new diseases will come into this country, like we've seen with West Nile Virus, and so on.
We will see the impacts. You know, the loss of coral reefs across the world. The acidification of the ocean is ongoing and so on. These are the real ... this is reality and ultimately you can't ignore it. The question is, will we act before it gets. . .before it's too late. Before it's truly irreversible. That's the real question. And that's the real challenge. As much as I've talked about this experiential processing side of human beings, which is this emotional side and ... and images, and so on, we also have this analytic side, and that's what science is. Science is the ... is one of the preeminent products of this ability to think carefully, deliberately and rationally about these issues, and to measure them and to identify them. If it wasn't for science, we wouldn't know about global warming. All we would know is what we were experiencing on individual local levels. It's science that told us about this problem. It was science that told us about the ozone hole. It's science that has let us all understand that there's a biodiversity crisis.
The challenge is, can we take this knowledge and communicate it, translate it into a way that it doesn't just appeal to this analytic side, but also appeals to this ... to the emotions, to the things that we feel and care about that engages people, that motivates people. Cold facts don't motivate people. You've got to engage this other system.
[sound under]
Joe: This has been a conversation with Anthony Leiserowitz
of Yale, one of a series about Communicating Climate Change. This is Joe
Cone of Oregon Sea Grant, an ocean and coastal research and education program
at Oregon State University. This and other podcasts, and their complete transcripts,
can be found online at seagrant.oregonstate.edu. That's s-e-a-grant:
one word, dot, oregonstate as one word, dot, edu. Thank you for listening.
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