Societies rely on tacit “frames” to conduct and understand conversations. One popular frame in Western democracies is the notion of “balance”—the idea that all sides of an issue deserve to be heard and that solutions can be found by balancing their demands and needs. This idea entails the assumption that all sides have a roughly symmetrical entitlement to be heard.

There is much merit to this notion. In Australian politics, the introduction of the GST (a VAT equivalent) was a case in point. After much parliamentary and public debate, a compromise was found by which food remained exempt from the GST—balancing the original plan of omnibus taxation with the need to control the basic costs of living. Similar examples abound in most Western democracies.

Resistance to such balance may deservedly earn the label “extremist,” although this label is applicable only when the media landscape in which a debate takes place is not systematically distorted.

Setting aside such possible distortions for now, “balance” is only one of several conversational frames in society. In some situations the idea of a symmetric entitlement of opinions is ludicrous, and an alternative frame is used that gives strong preference to one side over the other—for good reason: Few would propose that the needs and opinions of law enforcement ought to be “balanced” with those of organized crime. Tax revenues are legitimately reserved for the police and judiciary, and there is no “balancing” public expenditure for crime lords, Godfathers, and drug barons.

One would rarely be labelled “extremist” when invoking the Law in preference to protection rackets, bribery, or the armed militias of drug barons.

Tragedy strikes when a society confuses the applicability of those two very different frames.

Imagine what would happen to a country when the head of its national broadcaster accused the police and courts of “group think” and suggested that the Consigliere’s opinions should be given more weight by the judiciary. Imagine a country in which the leader of a major party referred to the Law as “crap” and met with one of the Godfathers for an extended private chat. Imagine a country in which the rule of law has been replaced with the rule of who can shout the loudest in the media.

Those are not just scary thoughts. They represent the frightening reality that has engulfed not just Australia but also—and perhaps even more so—the United States. Segments of those societies and the media have lost their grip on which conversational frame applies to the greatest scientific and ethical problems humanity has ever faced—climate change and how to deal with it by decarbonizing our economies.

The only “balance” that applies to climate science is that of evidence—and not of opinion or interests. In the same way that the verdicts of the courts should trump the protestations of organized crime, so the peer-reviewed literature must always trump internet cacophony or the opinions of ideological think tanks.

Tragically, however, the media now often “balance” science with noise that could be debunked in a few mouse clicks. In Australia, a Catholic Cardinal recently provided a perfect if stunning illustration of such ill-conceived “balance” when he gave Dr. Ayers, the Head of the Bureau of Meteorology, a public lesson—not in seeking prayer or avoiding divorce but in how to conduct science. Thumping a particularly egregious piece of fiction written by an individual with no relevant peer-reviewed publications but several directorships of mining corporations, the Cardinal called Dr. Ayers’s testimony to the Australian Senate … “unscientific.” Unscientific, because Dr. Ayers relied on the peer-reviewed literature in coming to his judgment that the Earth is warming owing to human CO2 emissions.

On the positive side, this incident underscores that in modern Catholicism Cardinals have latitude to ignore the Holy See’s opinions. On the more negative side, the largely uncritical and detached stance of the national media reveals that they have abandoned the distinction between evidence and noise, between peer-review and internet memes, between science and anti-scientific ideology.

Lest one think that the Cardinal’s episode is an isolated incident, recent research at the University of Queensland found that among Australian politicians, the percentage whose views on climate are influenced by scientists—as opposed to some other source, perhaps cat palmistry—ranges from 44% to 98% across the different parties. The extremist party that in its majority rejects science is on the conservative side of politics (called the Liberal Party), whereas the party that nearly exclusively relies on peer-reviewed science is the Greens—yet, the latter are readily labelled “extremist” by the media whereas the former are considered mainstream and “serious.”

This situation brings into focus several important questions: Does it matter? And how do we move on from here?

There are some good arguments that this faux “balance” and misrepresentation of science ought to be set aside—after all, the vast majority of Australians are convinced that climate change is happening and most also admit that humans are largely responsible (even if only indirectly; Leviston & Walker, 2010). In light of peak oil and other good reasons to abandon fossil fuels, perhaps we should just move on and transition to renewable forms of energy—which Australians seem to support by an overwhelming margin—and ignore the noise and inaccuracies in the media?

Two considerations speak against this option. First, there is some evidence that correct understanding of the causes of global warming is associated with people’s intentions to change relevant behaviours. For example, Bord et al. (2000) showed in a survey of more than 1000 Americans that “knowing what causes climate change, and what does not, is the most powerful predictor of both stated intentions to take voluntary actions and to vote on hypothetical referenda to enact new government policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions” (p. 205). Although this association may be moderated by other variables, such as political orientation (Malka et al., 2009), existing results leave little doubt that public misrepresentations of science are likely to have consequences, because public confusion about the science is one impediment to acting on climate change.

The second consideration may sound quaint in contemporary society but nonetheless cannot be ignored: It is simply a moral issue whether a society tolerates and acquiesces to systematic public misrepresentations and distortions of science and scientists. There is ample evidence for an association between public misperceptions of climate science and people’s preferred news outlets (Ramsay et al., 2010); people who preferentially get their news from Fox are most likely to be incorrectly informed about the state of climate science and in particular the consensus among climate scientists. This is not surprising in light of the recent revelation that casting doubt on climate data is a matter of editorial policy within this particular ”news” outlet.

So how do we move forward? Cognitive science has much to offer in this regard; from reframing to social norming and research on reasoning and ideology, we know much about barriers to public comprehension and action. That knowledge will be most helpful in assisting policy makers maximize the effectiveness of climate action.

But throughout, however the public debate may unfold, we must recognize that the only balance that counts in science is that of evidence. It appears inadvisable to lose track of that fact, even if segments of the media and society have slid into a bizarre corner from which evidence and reality appear “extremist” or “fundamentalist.”

(A shorter version of this article first appeared on The Conversation on 28 April 2011. It has been extended and updated for posting here)

References

Bord, R. J.; O’Connor, R. E. & Fisher, A. (2000). In what sense does the public need to understand global climate change? Public Understanding of Science, 9, 205-218.

Leviston, Z. & Walker, I. A. (2010). Baseline survey of Australian attitudes to climate change: Preliminary report. CSIRO (Behavioural Sciences Research Group).

Malka, A.; Krosnick, J. A. & Langer, G. (2009). The Association of Knowledge with Concern About Global Warming: Trusted Information Sources Shape Public Thinking
Risk Analysis, 29, 633-647.

Ramsay, C.; Kull, S.; Lewis, E. & Subias, S. (2010). Misinformation and the 2010 election: A study of the US electorate. Program on International Policy Attitudes, University of Maryland.

President Barack Obama was born in Hawaii on August 4, 1961. Recent U.S. surveys reveal that only 1 in 3 Republicans accept this simple fact, notwithstanding the incontrovertible evidence provided by something as straightforward as a Hawaiian birth certificate. The remaining 2 out of 3 Republicans either believe that President Obama was born outside the United States (between 45% and 51%, depending on the particular poll) or they profess uncertainty about his place of birth.

What motivates people who, based on Republican demographics likely earn a living in business or dentistry or some other well-paying job requiring at least a modicum of literacy, to overlook the obvious and subscribe to patent absurdities instead?

Last year, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, America’s highest scientific body, summarized the current state of climate science thus: “Some scientific conclusions or theories have been so thoroughly examined and tested, and supported by so many independent observations and results, that their likelihood of subsequently being found to be wrong is vanishingly small. Such conclusions and theories are then regarded as settled facts. This is the case for the conclusions that the Earth system is warming and that much of this warming is very likely due to human activities.”

Notwithstanding the Academy’s crystal clear statement, recent surveys reveal that the majority of U.S. Republicans do not accept this scientific fact. Climate science is clearly more complex and intricate than a birth certificate, so perhaps this is not altogether surprising. However, complexity alone does not explain why acceptance of the science decreases among Republicans with level of education as well as with their self-reported knowledge: Whereas Democrats who believe they understand global warming better also are more likely to believe that it poses a threat in their lifetimes, among Republicans by contrast, increased belief in understanding global warming is associated with decreased perception of its severity.

What motivates people to reject facts that are so strongly supported by evidence? And why are Republicans more likely to engage in such “denial” than Democrats?

The psychological literature provides some insight into this question.

To begin with, it must be realized that this has nothing to do with the particularities of American politics or some idiosyncratic aspect of the Republican Party itself. The same division of the political spectrum has been observed in other countries such as Canada (Heath & Gifford, 2006) or Australia (Leviston & Walker, 2010). The problem thus runs deeper; it crosses national boundaries but it always reveals a fissure along the left-right continuum of politics. Why?

Numerous studies converge onto the conclusion that there is a strong correlation between a person’s endorsement of unregulated free markets as the solution to society’s needs on the one hand, and rejection of climate science on the other (e.g., Heath & Gifford, 2006; Kahan, 2010). The more “fundamentalist” a person is disposed towards the free market, the more likely they are to be in denial of global warming. This ideological bent can be identified in a number of ways; for example, Heath and Gifford (2006) used a 6-item scale that pertains exclusively to the free market, whereas Kahan and colleagues have worked with a more elaborate scale that picks up people’s “worldviews” across a broader range of issues. Ultimately, the subtle differences between the various instruments pale in comparison to the common denominator: Endorsement of free markets in combination with other streaks of “hierarchical” or “authoritarian” thinking are statistically associated with rejection of climate science.

But why? What do markets have to do with geophysics?

The answer is that global warming, like many other environmental problems, poses a potential threat to laissez-faire business. If emissions must be cut, then markets must be regulated or at least “nudged” towards alternative sources of energy—and any possibility of regulation is considered a threat to the very essence of their worldview by those for whom the free market is sacrosanct. (As an aside, this fear of regulation can actually be counter-productive; there is evidence that regulation can have beneficial effects to the industry being regulated; Farzin, 2003. So rational self-interest is insufficient to explain the fear of regulation).

It is this deep psychological threat that in part explains the hyper-emotionality of the anti-science discourse: the fear of Obama as an alien “other”; frenetic alarmism about a “world government”; the rhetoric of “warmist” or “extremist” leveled at scientists who rely on the peer reviewed literature; the ready invocation of the spectre of “socialism”—they all point to the perception of a threat so fundamental that even crazed beliefs constitute an alluring antidote.

Does this mean that free-market economies are incompatible with action on climate change? Does this mean that irreconcilable differences remain between action on climate change and people with a “free-market” worldview?

Fortunately, the answer is “no” to both questions.

First, mainstream free-market economies embarked on a path towards reducing emissions long ago, and some of the most vigorous proponents of decarbonization of their economies are European leaders from the conservative side of politics, such as Britain’s David Cameron or Germany’s Angela Merkel. Likewise, mainstream free-market outlets such as The Economist have little patience for climate denial but instead focus on moving forward and creating new business opportunities in the clean-energy sector. Finally the peer-reviewed literature in regulatory economics is replete with analyses of the best way forward to cut emissions, further revealing the current wave of climate “skepticism” to be an exercise in misguided futility.

Second, there is evidence from the laboratory that reframing necessary action against climate change (or some other environmental problem) as a business opportunity rather than as a regulatory burden may elicit support for policy measures even from people whose worldview predisposes them towards the free market (Kahan et al., 2007). The fact that this reframing can enable people to support action on a problem whose very existence they would otherwise likely deny offers a path forward from the current impasse.

A related and quite intriguing result arose from a recent survey of some 5000 Australians (Leviston & Walker, 2010). The results showed that although people who identified with the conservative party (called the Liberal Party in Australia) were less likely to accept that humans cause climate change than people affiliated with other parties, they nonetheless held large corporations and industrialized countries responsible for it. In other words, “humans don’t cause climate change but large corporations are responsible.” One interpretation of this slightly illogical position is that public protestations of climate denial do not reflect people’s actual knowledge and acceptance of the science, but simply signal one’s tribal identity to other members of the tribe, as Naomi Klein has recently suggested.

References

Farzin, Y. H. (2003). The effects of emissions standards on industry. Journal of Regulatory Economics, 24, 315-327.

Heath, Y. & Gifford, R.(2006). Free-market ideology and environmental degradation: The case of belief in global climate change. Environment and Behavior, 38, 48-71.

Kahan, D. M. (2010). Fixing the communications failure. Nature, 463, 296-297.

Kahan, D. M.; Braman, D.; Slovic, P.; Gastil, J. & Cohen, G. L. (2007). The Second National Risk and Culture Study: Making Sense of – and Making Progress In – The American Culture War of Fact. Yale Law School, Public Law Working Paper No. 154.

Leviston, Z. & Walker, I. A. (2010). Baseline survey of Australian attitudes to climate change: Preliminary report. CSIRO (Behavioural Sciences Research Group).

Our planet is finite. We have 510,072,000 km² of surface area to sustain all human economic and social activity.  We have 510,072,000 km² to support all of life. Nothing will change this physical limit. Our economy is based on growth. A fundamental tenet of capitalism is a continually growing economy that produces more and more goods. Indeed, per capita world economic output (GDP) has increased nearly 20-fold since 1960. During the same period, the world’s population has increased from 3 billion to nearly 7 billion.

The figure below shows those two variables together: The explosive growth of wealth (in red) has outpaced the growth of population (in blue), thus permitting us to be wealthier now than our parents and grandparents ever were.

Figure 1

So far so good.

So where is the problem?

The problem is that a widely accepted model of population growth (e.g., Berryman, 1992), the so-called Malthus-Verhulst theory, proposes that populations do not grow indefinitely; instead, population growth typically follows a “logistic” function. This function is illustrated in the figure below, which implements the Malthus-Verhulst model (for a population of 10 animals initially across 700 time steps).

Figure 2

Note the similarity between the left-hand part of this curve (below time step 250) and the growth functions shown in the earlier figure: until such time as resources are beginning to be depleted, animal populations can enjoy increasingly fast growth, much like our economy has been enjoying near-continuous growth for the last century at least.

This gives rise to an obvious question: can we be sure that the world economy and the world population can continue to grow unabated? Do the trajectories in Figure 1 promise ever increasing wealth for ever more people? Or are we riding on the lower end of the type of trajectory shown in Figure 2, which retrospectively appears very promising at any of the first 250 time steps, but which need not hold for the future? And if our world is evolving along the path in Figure 2, how close are we to the inflection point beyond which things slowly grind to a halt?

There is evidence to suggest that we are right at or just past that inflection point, and that the world is facing multiple crises simultaneously that arise from our economic activities or expansion of human population.

Johan Rockström and colleagues recently presented an analysis in Nature (Rockström et al., 2009) that identified what they called a “safe operating space for humanity.” In a nutshell, this team of nearly 30 researchers made a first attempt at estimating boundaries for the biological and physical processes that underpin our welfare as a species. The team considered 8 global environmental parameters: (1) climate change, (2) ocean acidification, (3) stratospheric ozone depletion, (4) freshwater use, (5) biodiversity loss, (6) the nitrogen cycle, (7) the phosphorus cycle, and (8) land-use change.

Those particular parameters were chosen because they map into the principal large-scale systems that determine our global environment; namely, biogeochemical cycles (nitrogen, phosphorus, carbon, and water), the major physical circulation systems (climate, stratosphere, oceans), and biophysical features of Earth that contribute to the resilience of its self-regulatory capacity (biodiversity, land systems).

Their analyses and main conclusions are summarized in their beautiful figure, which I reproduce below:

Figure 3

Each sector in the figure represents one of the 8 indicator variables considered by Rockström and colleagues, plus two others that are highly relevant but which have escaped quantification so far (chemical pollution and aerosol loading). The safe operating space for humanity is represented by the green polygon in the center. Within each individual sector, the dotted black lines represent the measured trajectory since the 1950’s of the relevant driver variable. For example, atmospheric CO2 levels, which drive climate change, have continually increased in an outward trajectory, whereas ozone depletion has recently been reversed owing to global action on replacing CFC’s with other, more benign chemicals. The extent of the red wedge within each sector indicates the estimated current location of the underlying driver variable.

Without going into the specifics of each instance, it is clear that at least three of those crucial variables have exceeded their safe operating value—namely climate change, the rate of biodiversity loss, and the Nitrogen cycle. Given that Rockström and colleagues suggest that crossing even one of these boundaries would risk triggering abrupt or irreversible environmental change, the preceding figure does not present a reassuring pattern. To compound the problem, transgression of one boundary increases the likelihood of another one being breached—as is most readily apparent if one considers the fact that both climate change and ocean acidification are correlated consequences of increases in atmospheric CO2 levels.

Further interesting expert commentary on the article by Rockström and colleagues can be found on the Nature website. For present purposes, I accept that to a first approximation, their analysis is qualitatively correct.

Houston, we have a problem.

Except that there is no Houston that can help us with sage advice: There is only us, and it is upon us alone to rise to the enormous challenge of returning the state of the planet to its safe operating environment.

This, then, is the context for www.shapingtomorrowsworld.org : how do we prepare for, and how do we shape, a healthy and prosperous tomorrow in a finite world?

This requires new and creative thinking at many levels. It requires analysis of physical as well as psychological variables. Most of all, it requires acceptance of the fact that “business as usual” is no longer a safe option.

We look forward to exploring all those issues with you here on www.shapingtomorrowsworld.org.

References

Berryman, A. A. (1992). The origins and evolution of predator-prey theory. Ecology, 74, 1530-1535.

Rockström, J., Steffen, W., Noone, K., Persson, A., Chapin, F. S., Lambin, E. F., Lenton, T. M., Scheffer, M., Folke, C., Schellnhuber, H. J., Nykvist, B., de Wit, C. A., Hughes, T., van der Leeuw, S., Rodhe, H., Sorlin, S., Snyder, P. K., Costanza, R., Svedin, U., Falkenmark, M., Karlberg, L., Corell, R. W., Fabry, V. J., Hansen, J., Walker, B., Liverman, D., Richardson, K., Crutzen, P., & Foley, J. A. (2009). A safe operating space for humanity. Nature, 461, 472-475.

As the physical understanding of climate change within the scientific community has become more and more robust, paradoxically the public debate has become progressively more disconnected from the scientific literature.

It’s unsurprising, then, that Hans Schellnhuber, climate advisor to the German government and himself a natural scientist, recently argued that 90% of all research on global change ought to be conducted by social scientists. Indeed, it requires social science to understand this growing disconnect between scientific reality and public perception.

Many factors can be cited to explain this disconnect: Among them are the media’s misplaced attempts to “balance” scientific knowledge with the mere words of contrarian bloggers and political operatives, and the well-documented efforts by vested interests and political groups to sow doubts about climate science.

But in addition to such political or sociological factors, climate change also challenges our basic cognitive abilities.

In particular, people have considerable difficulty understanding the notion of accumulation, and how changes to one variable affect the accumulation of another.

Understanding emissions

To illustrate, consider first the relationship between total atmospheric CO2 (currently around 390 ppm) and global temperatures.

Atmospheric CO2 and global temperatures are coupled, such that any increase in CO2 will lead to further temperature rises in the long run. Stabilization of atmospheric CO2 is therefore a precondition for limiting warming.

But what about the relationship between annual CO2 emissions and atmospheric CO2 concentrations?

If we want to stabilize CO2 in order to stabilize the climate, how much do we have to reduce annual emissions?

In an elegant series of studies, MIT’s John Sterman has shown that even highly-educated people, such as engineering graduates, are unlikely to answer this question correctly without further specialized training (e.g., Sterman & Sweeney, 2007).

When shown the trajectory of annual CO2 emissions, which to date has exhibited an ever-accelerating increase, the majority of people will propose that stabilization of emissions, or a slight decrease, will be sufficient to stabilize atmospheric CO2.

This is completely and inescapably false.

Filling the global bathtub

In actual fact, to stabilize atmospheric CO2, emissions must be cut drastically, and the longer action is delayed, the more steeply emissions must be cut.

This is because CO2 accumulates in the atmosphere in the same way as the water level in a bathtub rises while the tap is on. Absent any leakage, the only way to stabilize the water level is to shut off the tap completely.

Similarly, we must eventually reduce emissions to zero if we wish CO2 levels to stabilise and then, by natural absorption, to ever so gradually reduce over time.

In a recent radio interview, Professor Tim Flannery (the chief of Australia’s national Climate Change Commission) mentioned the fact that a reduction in global temperatures will take hundreds of years to materialize even if CO2 emissions were to cease completely and instantly.

In a rapid-fire display of ignorance, several national media figures and politicians, including the leader of the Federal opposition, mistook this statement to imply that cutting emissions was a useless and unnecessary endeavour. Of course it isn’t.

Quite to the contrary, before we can even think about a reduction in temperatures we must cut emissions to prevent a further, potentially devastating rise in global temperatures.

The data by Sterman and colleagues show that people have difficulty with these essential physical relationships.

Because this cognitive limitation has until now translated into policy inaction, the climate problem gets bigger every day.

Any further delay of action translates into the need for ever-greater emission cuts: the fuller the bathtub, the more rapidly the tap must be shut to avoid an overflow.

The figure below, taken from Allison et al. (2009), illustrates this problem and compares the global emissions paths required to have any chance to limit warming to 2C, depending on when they peak. The longer we wait, the harsher the cuts.

Where we go wrong

Why do people have difficulty understanding the notion of accumulation, despite it being readily explainable with the bathtub analogy?

People often process information about dynamic variables on the presumption that the output of a complex system “looks like” the input.

So, if emissions are reduced, atmospheric CO2 levels are correspondingly assumed to fall, when in fact they continue to increase, albeit at a reduced rate.

And this cognitive strategy bites us a second time; namely, when it comes to mitigation efforts. One plausible reason that fear campaigns arguing emission cuts will decrease our wealth have gained traction is that in the past, wealth accumulation has paralleled the increase of CO2 emissions.

By again applying the strategy that variables in a complex system “look alike”, people can easily be convinced that reducing emissions will also reduce wealth.

This presumption is as false as the presumption that cutting emissions will reduce atmospheric CO2.

According to most economic modelling, cutting emissions will not cut wealth. Emission cuts will not even abolish economic growth; they will merely slow the rate at which our society accumulates wealth.

According to the Australian Treasury, cutting emissions by 90% by 2050 would still see per capita GNP rise from the current $50,000 to around $80,000.

In light of this clear path forward towards increasing wealth in a safe climate, the current state of public debate in Australia and other western countries is indeed sadly misguided.

(A variant of this article first appeared on The Conversation on 5 April 2011. It has been modified and updated slightly for posting here)

References

Allison, I.; Bindoff, N. L.; Bindschadler, R. A.; Cox, P. M.; de Noblet, N.; England, M. H.; Francis, J. E.; Gruber, N.; Haywood, A. M.; Karoly, D. J.; Kaser, G.; Le Quéré, C.; Lenton, T. M.; Mann, M. E.; McNeil, B. I.; Pitman, A. J.; Rahmstorf, S.; Rignot, E.; Schellnhuber, H. J.; Schneider, S. H.; Sherwood, S. C.; Somerville, R. C. J.; Steffen, K.; Steig, E. J.; Visbeck, M. & Weaver, A. J. (2009).
The Copenhagen Diagnosis 2009: Updating the World on the Latest Climate Science. Technical Report, University of New South Wales.

Sterman, J. D. & Sweeney, L. B. (2007). Understanding public complacency about climate change: adults’ mental models of climate change violate conservation of matter. Climatic Change, 80, 213-238.