Al Gore is part of the problem -- new survey

Not only is Al Gore -- and by extension every member of his Climate Project army of slide-show presenters, including me -- wasting everyone's time trying to wake up the world to the perils of climate change, but the whole mission could actually be making things worse. That's what you'd have to conclude if you buy the results of a study of public attitudes that just appears in the journal Risk Analysis.

The authors of the study, "Personal Efficacy, the Information Environment, and Attitudes Toward Global Warming and Climate Change in the United States," work at Texas A&M. (Two of the three under the auspices of the George Bush School of Government and Public Service, but we'll try not to hold that against them.) They set out to test the reasonable hypothesis that

First, one should expect to see higher amounts of information to be related to higher degrees of personal efficacy and responsibility for global warming and climate change. Second, one should expect to see higher amounts of information to be related to heightened perceptions about the risks of global warming and climate change.

Instead they found the opposite.

...respondents with higher levels of information about global warming show less concern about global warming. The effects here are statistically significant, but they are modest in magnitude. Moving from the least-informed respondents to the most-informed ones produces, on average, about two-tenths of a point shift in concern about global warming and climate change. On a scale ranging from 1 to 4, a shift of two-tenths of a point should not be overstated; the effect, though modest, is discernible from zero.

Yikes. But it gets worse:

Respondents who showed a great deal of confidence that scientists understand global warming and climate change showed significantly less concern for the risks of global warming than did those who have lower trust in scientists. Though this effect differs from our expectations, it is consistent with the notion that people trust that scientists will be able, somehow, to devise technical solutions to any problems that arise because of global warming and climate change. The effect is statistically significant, but not particularly large: moving from the extreme of a "very unclear" understanding to the other of a "very clear" understanding produces, on average, a movement of approximately one-quarter of a point shift on our four-point scale for the dependent variable. The effect is discernible from zero, but its magnitude should not be overstated.

Their study was based on a telephone poll of 1,093 Americans, so it's about as accurate as your typical CNN/USA Today poll -- not quite as good as the best polls, but relatively reliable. So how do we account for the counter-intuitive findings? After all, if they are a good representation of the way Americans have responded to the recent onslaught of attention to the climate crisis, then everything Al Gore and everyone else who is trying to spread the message of concern has done is pointless. We might as well give up now. The more we try to get people with the program, the more they'll turn away.

The authors speculate that the media are partly to blame through their obsession with false equivalency ;;;;; the instinctive habit of providing balance even though the scientific community is almost unanimous about the science involved. They point out that, among climatologists, "knowledge of global warming is the strongest single predictor of behavioral intentions." In other words, there's a huge gap between the expected response of climatologists and the response of lay people. And since the media are, well, the media through which knowledge is shared, they must be at least part of the problem.

However, there is are two features of the study that has been left out of the coverage I've so far. First the findings apply only to the U.S., and say nothing about what the Chinese are thinking. Second, the poll was conducted from July 13 to August 10, 2004. That would be before An Inconvenient Truth hit the theaters. Before Al gave me and the other 1,000 members of the Climate Project our marching orders. Before the media finally stopped giving the handful of non-climatologist scientists equal time. Before last winter's stunning melt of the north polar ice cap. Before the Fourth IPCC Assessment was released and before all that new data on Greenlandic and Antarctic ice sheet collapse came out.

I would hope, though I have no data to support this contention beyond what small shred of optimism I can dredge up after almost 20 years of reading ever-more-depressing science, that a similar poll taken now would produce different results. I would think that Al Gore, Bill McKibben et al, would have to tell themselves that, especially as they launch their own media campaigns to move public opinion even further. Gore's group has plans to spend $300 million to that end; McKibben is behind the 350 movement in hopes of finding the collective resolve, not just to stabilize carbon-dioxide emission, but to get them below current numbers in the next few decades.

The authors also suggest that maybe those of us who trust scientists simply have more faith in science to solve the problem. Another hopeful hypothesis. I know it doesn't apply to me. The more I read, the harder it gets to stick to the party line that we have the capacity to do what's necessary to avoid catastrophic change. The latest thoughts from NASA's Jim Hansen, for example, do not exactly inspire me. In a a draft of a new paper he reiterates his fears that the only way to bring down our emissions fast enough is to shut down all the world's coal-fired plants over the next three decades. Theoretically possible, but....

Whatever the psychology, the authors of the Risk Analysis study conclude that "it cannot be comforting to the researchers in the scientific community that the more trust people have in them as scientists, the less concerned they are about their findings."

They got that right.

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