The study reveals the only thing that penetrates climate indifference: loss

Over the twentieth century, winter brought annual rituals to Princeton, New Jersey. Carnegie Lake froze, and the skiers flocked to its glossy surface. These days, the ice is rarely thick enough to support anyone wearing signings, because the Brentston winter has improved 4 degrees Fahrenheit Since 1970, it has been a lost tradition that Grace Liu is linked to a warming climate as a university student at the University of Princeton in 2020, where he had a long interview with the population and dug through the newspaper archive to create a record of ice conditions in the lake.

“People definitely notice that they were able to go out to the lake less,” said Liu, who is now a PhD. A student at Carnegie Mellon University. “However, they have not necessarily associated this trend for climate change.”

When the university graduates magazine appeared in the winter of 2021, Comment section It was full of sad memories of skiing under the moonlight, pushing the crowd to play hockey, and drinking hot chocolate next to the frozen lake. Liu began to ask: Can this type of direct and visceral loss make climate change feel more vital to people?

This question raises Her studiesIt was recently published in the Nature Human Behavior magazine, which reached an amazing conclusion: Boiling data can help in a duo – this or that – can help Humility of indifference about climate change.

Liu worked with professors in Princeton to test how people responded to different graphic fees. One of them showed winter temperatures for a fictional city that gradually rising over time, while the other presented the same trend to warm in a black or white way: the lake froze in any specific year, or did not do so. People who saw the second graph seen climate change as causing more sudden changes.

Both planners are the same amount of warming in the winter, as it was presented differently. “We are not a repression,” said Rashit Dobby, the co -author of the study, who is now a professor of communications at the University of California, Los Angeles. “We literally offer them the same trend, just in different formats.”

The strong reaction to the black width or eggs was heavily heavily over a series of experiments, and even its position as the trend line was placed on a scattered plot of temperatures to make the warming very clear. To ensure translated results into the broader world, researchers also considered how people interacted with actual data to freeze the lake and increase the temperature of cities in the United States and Europe and got the same results. “The effects of psychology are sometimes volatile.” “This is one of the cleanest effects that we have seen at all.”

The results indicate that if scientists want to increase general insistence on climate change, they must highlight the concrete and concrete transformations instead of slow directions. This can include white Christmas loss or outdoor summer activities that have been canceled due to wild smoke.

The “boiling frog” metaphor is sometimes used to describe how people fail to respond to the gradual changes in the climate. The idea is that if you put a frog in boiling water, you will jump immediately. But if you put it in room temperature water and slowly raise the heat, the frog will not realize the danger and it will be boiled alive. Although real frogs are actually smart enough to jump when the water becomes dangerously hot, borrowing suits humans when it comes to climate change: people are mentally adapt to the temperature “increases” worrying fasting “, according to the study. Previous research has found that with the high temperature of the climate, people adjust their feeling of what appears naturally on the basis of the weather from The past to eight yearsA phenomenon known as “changing the foundation lines”.

Many scientists have agreed in the hope that governments will finally reduce fossil fuel emissions when he made a devastating hurricane, heat wave, or climate change effects. Last year, weather disasters caused More than $ 180 billion of damage In the United States, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. However, climate change is still not cracked in the ranks of what Americans say they are more concerned. Before the 2024 presidential elections, an opinion poll found that climate change is ranked near the bottom of the list 22 casesMuch less than the economy, terrorism or health care.

“The tragedies will continue to escalate in the background, but this does not happen quickly to think,” well, that’s all. We need to stop everything we are decisively. ”I think this is a greater danger we face as climate change – it never becomes. the problem.”

One of the graphs on the lake freezing data will not push people to classify climate change as the best issue, of course. But Dubi believes that if people see convincing pictures often, this may help maintain the problem of climate change from fading from their minds. The Dubey study shows that there is a cognitive reason behind the echo of bilateral data with people: it creates a mental illusion that the situation has changed suddenly, when it has already changed.

The importance of using data perceptions to get an idea is often overlooked, according to Jennifer Marlon, a great research scientist about climate connection. “We know that (data photos) can be strong tools for communication, but they often miss their mark, partly because most scientists have not been trained, although many excellent resources are available,” Marlon said in an email. She said that bilateral images can be used to transfer urgency to process climate change, although their use tends to lose complexity and richness of data.

The results of the study not only apply to frozen lakes – global temperatures can be connected in more clear ways. Popularity “Climate lines” visual Ed Hawkins, a professor at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom, explains the temperature changes with vertical ranges of lines, as Azraq refers to cold years and Al -Ahmar refers to that warm. When the graph turns from deep blue to deep red, it transmits the direction of warming at a more brutal level. The lines simplify the gradual trend into a two -style image that makes it easier to understand. “Our study explains the reason for the popularity of climate lines in reality and resonates with people,” Dubi said.

This article was originally appeared in Barrier in https://grist.org/science/break-through-imate-aPathy-data-Visualization-lake-freezing-study/. Grist is a non -profit and independent media organization dedicated to the novel of climate solution stories and a just future. Learn more in Grist.org.