So only 41% of people believe what scientific consensus tells them. I wonder how many people believe that abstaining from junk food will prolong their lives? Believing something to be fact doesn't make you do anything about it: you have to want to do it at an emotional level. It's a fact that I'd lose weight if I ate less, but I enjoy eating so I tend not to cut down. I do a fair bit of exercise though, but only because I enjoy it.
Equally, you don't have to believe in man-made climate change to do something about it. If the government gave you enough of a financial incentive to insulate your home, you'd do it, even if you weren't struggling with your fuel bills and didn't care where your energy came from. Farmers used to receive subsidies to grow food, so they did so, and if they received subsidies to grow energy crops, they'd do so, whether or not they thought energy crops were morally superior to food. Governments note: people tend to respond better to incentives than penalties, unless those penalties are really punitive. Tax on cigarettes, petrol and alcohol continue to rise without much effect on their (harmful) consumption. But customers love loss leaders and BOGOF deals at supermarkets.
People crave clear equations. Whatever you think about GM foods you will agree that scientific opinion is far less united than it is for man-made climate change. Yet people latched on willingly to the idea that GM was bad - in my view because they could see a straightforward equation: 'don't start growing GM foods, and nothing will go wrong'. Climate change is providing dramatic imagery with every flood and storm, but 'don't start burning oil' is not an option because we opened that particular can of worms a long time ago. So what is the use of acting now?
If people can't see how their own actions could solve a problem, they're unlikely to accept that their actions brought it about. People know that stopping smoking would be good for them, so if they continue to smoke they do so in the knowledge they're doing themselves harm.
People don't trust what they're told by the media or by governments. It's not so long ago that the public was told smoking was actually good for them. I'm too young to know how many people believed that. Now we're told it's bad for us. Should we be surprised that not everyone jumps to attention when the messages we receive are so mixed?
For all this, I think what the statistics really shows is that people struggle to comprehend the timescales over which our activities have an impact. The writer Charles Handy suggests that individuals can only look as far into the future as they have already experienced the past. That's why a 5 year old child finds anyone over about 12 to be unfathomably old. So, climate change targets are being set for 2050, 2080, ie 40-70 years ahead, and the actions we're being held responsible for began at least 200 years ago and accelerated in the past 50 years. Looking back or forward, only people over about 40 or 50 have a frame of reference for the timescales we're talking about.
Then we must add into the mix the fact that, the older someone is, the more they will have been worn down by the endless cycles of apocalyptic scares that never materialised, and by the perpetual sense that life and society has just got gradually worse the longer they've observed it. So their own empirical evidence tells them, that's just the way things are. Life's hard and then you die.
My reasoning is as compelling as it is unscientific. People under, say, 20 are so young in relation to the timescales for which we're apportioning blame and setting targets, that they are just daunted by it all. People over, say, 70 are cynical about whether anyone has any effect on anything. People between 20 and 40 or so are too busy trying to get careers, mortgages, marriages and children to worry much, although they are probably more likely to believe the basic science. So people in the 40-70 age bracket find themselves landed with most of the challenge: understanding the evidence and the timeframe; feeling guilty about their past excesses; affording individual action where it has financial impact; educating their peers and their young, as best they can, in the need to consider the future.
And I would guess (there's science for you) that the 40-70 age bracket is currently about 40% of the population.
The practical lesson of this must surely be that to engage different groups of the population in acting on climate change (or anything else) you need to relate it to a timeframe they can deal with.
AW.
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