The Climate Change Winds May be Shifting

     
David Ropeik ( for Big Think)

The latest round of international negotiations about climate change get underway in South Africa this week, and will prompt a lot of press coverage, mostly about the likelihood that, once again, the nations of the world will fail to agree on anything of substance. But developments a couple weeks ago that got less attention may promise more progress on climate change than all the posturing in Durban. Those developments portend that climate change may finally be turning into a serious, tangible, immediate threat, the kind that worries us enough to push our politicians to act.

You may have seen one of these developments, the report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that finds that climate change is probably associated with some of the extreme weather the world has been experiencing in the past few years, and will probably lead to more extreme weather events in the future. The other got much less notice but might be more important. A survey of American public opinion about whether climate change exacerbated specific recent extreme weather events in the U.S. taken before the IPCC report linked climate change and extreme weather, found that large majorities of Americans already see a connection.

The important new element here is not the IPCC evidence.  What’s new and vital here is the evidence that the nature of the threat is changing, a shift that may finally make us feel more threatened, and more ready to act. The study of the psychology of risk perception has found that we are less afraid of risks like climate change that are abstract, that don’t seem to threaten us directly and personally, and that are delayed, than we are of threats that are concrete, personal, and happening now or soon. Climate change used to be a not-so-personally-threatening threat to distant ice caps and polar bears and “those poor people over there who are barely surviving”, something that may make sea levels invisibly creep higher, and might do bad things to us ‘someday’. Nothing most people think of as really, personally, scary.

So, unprecedented hurricanes, tornadoes, floods and earthquakes will convince people that global warming is a threat to the planet ; where a hundred articles and lectures about a possible future would fail. Then let the weather tell the story.