A
study led by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology suggests that
climate change may pose an even greater threat to the global food supply
than previously thought. That’s because higher temperatures will also
increase air pollution. A significant increase in the production of
ozone, a toxic gas, could prove deadly for many important crops.
The
global food supply is already under intense pressure. By the year 2050 —
due to population growth and changing dietary preferences — it’s
anticipated we will need 50 percent more food than is currently being
grown. Yet crop yields may decrease10 percent over this time
period due to higher temperatures. And the anticipated rise in ozone
pollution could make that decrease even greater.
Crops differ in
whether they’re more vulnerable to temperature or ozone pollution.
Wheat, for instance, is more sensitive to ozone pollution than to heat,
whereas soybeans and corn are impacted more by rising temperatures.
Still,
researchers found that increased ozone levels accounted for 46 percent
of the damage to soybeans. This underscores the fact that a combination
of high temperatures and increased ozone would be devastating for some
of the world’s most important crops.
Reduced emissions and
stronger air quality regulations can help mitigate the problem. In
countries such as the United States, South Korea and Japan — which have
fairly strong regulations — ozone is expected to decrease in coming
years.
To protect the global food supply, it is critical that we
invest in renewable energy sources and tighten air quality standards
worldwide.
“Earth Wise” is heard on WAMC Northeast Public Radio and is supported by the Cary Institute.
Saturday, October 4, 2014
Psychologists Are Learning How to Convince Conservatives to Take Climate Change Seriously
Photo: Timothy A. Clary/AFP/Getty Images
Last week’s People's Climate March drew 400,000 people onto the
streets of Manhattan and a great deal of international attention to a
subject of dire urgency. But some were skeptical about the event’s
overall significance. “The march slogan was, ‘to change everything, we
need everyone,’ which is telling, because it won’t change everything,
because it didn’t include everyone,” wrote David Roberts of Grist. “Specifically, it won’t change American politics because it didn’t include conservatives.” True enough.
If
there weren’t such a stark divide between American conservatives and
almost everyone else on the question of the existence and importance of
climate change — a divide that can approach 40 points on some polling questions
— the political situation would be very different. So if any progress
on climate change is going to be made through the American political
system — apart from executive orders by Democratic presidents
— it is going to have to somehow involve convincing a lot of
conservatives that yes, climate change is a threat to civilization.
How do you do that? The answer has more to do with psychology than politics.
The practice of tailoring a political message to a particular group
is commonplace, of course. But the climate activist community has
broadly failed to understand just how differently conservatives and
liberals see the world on certain issues, and, as a result, just how
radically different messages targeting conservatives should look.
“Although
climate scientists update, appropriately, their models after ten years
of evidence, climate-science communicators haven’t,” said Dan Kahan,
a professor of law and psychology at Yale who studies how people
respond to information challenging their beliefs. Luckily, social and
political psychologists are on the case. “I think there’s an emerging
science of how we should talk about this if we’re going to be effective
at getting any sort of movement,” said Robb Willer, a sociologist at Stanford.
It’s worth pointing out, of course, that for many conservatives (and
liberals), the current debate about climate change isn’t really about
competing piles of evidence or about facts at all — it’s about identity.
Climate change has come to serve as shorthand for which side you’re on,
and conservatives tend to be deeply averse to what climate crusaders
represent (or what they think they represent). “The thing most likely to
make it hard to sway somebody is that you’re trying to sway them,” said
Kahan.
But in practical, apolitical contexts, many conservatives already
recognize and are willing to respond to the realities of climate change.
“There’s a climate change people reject,” Kahan explained. “That’s the
one they use if they have to be a member of one or another of those
groups. But there’s the climate change information they accept that’s
just of a piece with all the information and science that gets used in
their lives.” A farmer approached by a local USDA official with whom
he’s worked before, for example, isn’t going to start complaining about
hockey-stick graphs or biased scientists when that official tells him
what he needs to do to account for climate-change-induced shifts to
local weather patterns.
In a larger context, social scientists have shown in laboratory
settings that there are ways to discuss climate change that nudge
conservatives toward recognizing the issue. Research is proceeding along
a few different tracks. One of them involves moral foundations theory,
a hot idea in political psychology that basically argues that people
holding different political beliefs arrive at those beliefs because they
have different moral values (even if there’s plenty of overlap).
Liberals tend to be more moved by the idea of innocent people being
harmed than conservatives, for example, while conservatives are more
likely to react to notions of disgust (some of the conservative rhetoric over immigration reflects this difference).
In a study they published in Psychological Science in 2013,
Willer and a colleague, the Stanford social psychologist Matthew
Feinberg, tested the effectiveness of framing environmental issues in a
way that takes into account conservatives’ moral foundations. After
completing a questionnaire that included items about their political
beliefs, respondents were asked to read one of three excerpts. The
unfortunate control group “read an apolitical message on the history of
neckties.” For the other two groups, though, what followed was an
op-ed-like block of text designed to stoke either “care/harm” (innocents
suffering) or “purity/sanctity” (disgust) concerns — one excerpt
“described the harm and destruction humans are causing to their
environment and emphasized how important it is for people to care about
and protect the environment,” while the other touched on “how polluted
and contaminated the environment has become and how important it is for
people to clean and purify the environment.”
Afterwards, respondents were gauged on their pro-environmental
attitudes and belief in global warming. In the care/harm group, there
was a sizable gap between liberals and conservatives on both measures.
In the disgust group, however, there was no statistically significant
difference in general environmental attitudes, and the gap on belief in
global warming had been cut significantly.
Another promising route that researchers are exploring involves the
concept of “system justification.” Put simply, system justification
arises from the deep-seated psychological need for humans to feel like
the broad systems they are a part of are working correctly. It doesn’t
feel good to know you attend a broken school or inhabit a deeply corrupt
country — or that your planet’s entire ecology may be on the brink of
collapse.
People tend to deal with major threats to their systems in one of two
ways: taking a threat so seriously that they seek out ways to
neutralize it, or “finding ways to justify away problems in order to
maintain the sense of legitimacy and well-being of the system,”
explained Irina Feygina, a social psychologist at New York University. This latter route is system justification.
Conservatives don’t have a monopoly on system justification, but
there’s strong evidence they do it more than liberals. “There’s a lot of
research that just goes out and asks people what their opinions and
preferences are, and pretty consistently — I don’t actually know of any
examples to the contrary — people who tend to report being further on
the conservative end of the spectrum also report having greater
confidence in the system and greater motivation to justify it,” said
Feygina.
She and two colleagues looked into the connection between system justification and environmental beliefs for a series of studies published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin
in 2009. They found that, among an undergraduate sample at least, there
was a strong correlation between system justification (as measured by
reactions to items like “In general, the American political system
operates as it should”) and denial of environmental problems.
In a follow-up study designed to test whether this relationship was
causal or simply correlational, students read a rather vanilla statement
about how researchers have been tracking, with interest, changes to the
environment. Some of the students also read two extra sentences: “Being
pro-environmental allows us to protect and preserve the American way of
life. It is patriotic to conserve the country’s natural resources.”
This final bit was designed specifically to “reframe[e]
pro-environmental change as consistent with system preservation” by
emphasizing not a threat to a beleaguered system, but rather an
opportunity to help protect an established, robust one.
After reading the passage, students rated their agreement with ten
statements about whether and to what extent they planned on engaging in
pro-environmental activities, and were asked if they would like to sign
various pro-environmental petitions. In the control condition, those who
felt a stronger urge to justify the system expressed weaker
pro-environmental intentions and signed fewer petitions. In the
experimental group, though, the researchers effectively defused the
effects of system justification: there was no difference in attitudes
and numbers of petition signed between strong and weak system
justifiers.
So how would this translate to a real-world message? “What you need
to do is put the system first,” said Feygina. “Instead of saying, ‘Let’s
deal with climate change, let’s be pro-environmental, let’s protect the
oceans,’ what you need to do is come in and say, ‘If we want to
preserve our system, if we want to be patriotic, if we want our children
to have the life that we have, then we have to take these actions that
allow us to maintain those things that we care about.’” The starting
point can’t be about averting catastrophe, in other words — it has to be
about pride in the current system and the need to maintain it.
She cited the film Carbonnation as an example:
There’s
strikingly little talk of disaster here. Rather, climate change is
viewed as a challenge to a great country, yes, but also an opportunity
to profit, to save money, to compete with China. And, crucially, the
messengers aren’t environmentalists or easily identified “activists,”
but instead are folks who fit into a conservative view of patriotism and
hard work (“military, farmers, Midwesterners, people living in rural
areas,” as Feygina put it). The environmental imagery isn’t melting ice
caps or stranded polar bears — it’s snow-white clouds and sparkling,
bubbling streams. And the filmmakers instantly neutralize any sense that
this is about group membership by stating that the film is for both
believers in and deniers of human-induced global warming. The movie’s
tagline alone — “A climate change solutions movie (that doesn’t care if
you believe in climate change)” — echoes many of Kahan, Willer, and
Feygina’s suggestions.
Still, it’s not as though shifts in framing can undo decades of
culture-war battles. Willer was realistic in describing the limitations
of grafting language from moral foundations theory and system
justification onto climate-change messages. “It’s unlikely that such a
short, small framing intervention would have a long, sustained effect —
that’s very unlikely,” said Willer. “The idea, we hope, is that
application of these techniques in a longer-term more committed campaign
would be effective and would stick.”
Another challenge, though, is that many of the messages that do seem
to work for liberals — at least “work” in the sense of helping to build
communities, organize marches, and so on — are ones that conservatives
will likely find extremely off-putting. Climate activists often stamp
their feet, perplexed as to how dire talk of ecologies collapsing and
cities getting flooded don’t reach conservatives even as they assist in
fund-raising and in activating liberals. “Oftentimes people decide on
how they’re going to build their [message] based on intuition — they say
‘Oh, this is how humans works,’” said Feygina.
But that intuition is often flawed. If climate activists are serious
about doing anything other than preaching to the choir, they’re going to
have to understand that messages that feel righteous and work on
liberals may not have universal appeal. To a liberal, the system isn’t
working and innocent people will suffer as a result — these are
blazingly obvious points. But conservatives have blazingly obvious
points of their own: The system works and we need to protect it, and
it’s important not to let pure things be defiled.
Climate activists, said Feygina, are often “not able to step outside
that and ask questions about how we process information, and what are
the barriers at hand.” And that, she said, “completely misses the
target.”
http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2014/09/how-to-convince-conservatives-on-climate-change.htmlhttp://nymag.com/scienceofus/2014/09/how-to-convince-conservatives-on-climate-change.html
Let
us recognize that we to be a part of sanitation revolution in India:
Let us Pledge to care about the state of public spaces as our Home is a
few days old now. Hopefully you’ve already reached most of the people
you know personally through email and social networks. Now it’s time to
branch out a bit and get some exposure on other websites.
Blogs, websites, and even news journalists are always looking for interesting things to write about. Posting information on your petition can help you get more signatures and help enrich their sites.
For blogs and websites: Are
there websites or blogs you read often that are related to your topic
in some way? Those are great places to start because other readers are
probably also into the issue. Some sites will even let you create an
account and post your own stories. Look for a phone number to call or an
address to email to notify them about your petition and see whether
they’d be willing to post it.
For news: You can join
the conversation about the news and even try to situate yourself AS the
news. The comments thread in a related story is a great place to link
your petition -- journalists often read comments to their own stories,
as do their readers. Journalists are increasingly using twitter to keep
up to the minute and find out about new stories, so it's common to
message or tweet @ someone who you think would be interested in your
issue.
See you in the headlines, The Avaaz Community Petitions team
Bees are dying by the million--but pesticide companies have just asked the EPA to increase the allowable level of bee-killing pesticides by as much as 400 times.1
Chemical companies like Dow, Bayer, and Syngenta are making billions
selling bee-killing pesticides called neonics--chemicals that scientists
have compared to DDT in the level of threat posed to the environment.2
In fact, neonics are wiping out bee colonies so fast that the European
Union has enacted a continent-wide moratorium on their use.3
Increasing the allowable levels by 400 times? That’s insane.
The EPA is only accepting public input on this decision until October 6, so we don't have much time. Can you chip in to help convince them to reject this awful proposal?
If you don’t think bees are important, think again. Of the world’s major food crops, 71% are dependent on bees for pollination.4
It’s this simple: No bees, no farms. No farms, no food.
Earlier this year, our state affiliates in Texas and New York helped our
allies at Friends of the Earth and the Pesticide Research Institute
discover that half the "bee-friendly" plants we tested from stores like
Home Depot contained the bee-killing pesticides.5
Now we need to blow the whistle on the pesticide industry’s plan to jack up the allowable level of bee-killing pesticides.
If you donate today, you’ll help us mobilize grassroots support to
convince the EPA to reject the pesticide industry’s petition.
