• A large majority of people think the climate is changing (78%)
• A large majority of people are concerned about this (71%)
• A large majority support the use of tax revenue to fund low-carbon policies such as investment in renewables (68%)
• A large majority of people say they are willing to reduce the amount of energy they use in order to tackle climate change (65%)

If this doesn’t sound like the findings you saw reported, or your impression of public attitudes towards climate change, then go and look up the results which are publicly available. The picture in the US is slightly different, but not drastically so, with large majorities agreeing that climate change is happening and expressing support for developing low-carbon energy infrastructure.

Large majorities agree that climate change is happening and express support for developing low-carbon energy infrastructure

But what about belief in whether humans are causing climate change? Isn’t that the crucial measure of scepticism?

Intriguingly, given that the public are frequently portrayed as teetering on the brink of abandoning climate change altogether, one of the US polls recorded an increase in the number of people who believe that human activity is changing the climate (the other had no previous survey to compare with, but found that 75% acknowledged human influence on the climate).

True, the number of people who agree that climate change is largely the result of human activity is significantly lower (in the UK and the US) than it was three years ago. But given the four consistent findings outlined above, the big question has to be ‘so what’?

Consider the BBC poll conducted in February, routinely cited as the most damaging of the public opinion polls in the UK. The statistic that was widely reported and repeated was that only 26% of the public agreed that:

“Climate change is happening and is now established as largely man-made”

Seems pretty damning doesn’t it? But a further 38% agreed that:

“Climate change is happening, but not yet proven to be largely man-made”

Even in the BBC poll, at the height of everything-gate, a healthy majority accepted that the climate was changing. In the very same poll, only 11% reported being any less concerned about the risks of climate change. The BBC results are completely consistent with the fact that a majority of people are concerned about climate change – anthropogenic or not – and want something done about it.

That significant numbers of people feel confused about whether human influence is responsible for climate change is unsurprising – a great deal of effort has been expended in trying to confuse them. The parallels between the strategies of the tobacco industry in the 1960s and the tactics of ideologically driven climate sceptics today are now well documented. The tobacco companies knew that if they could create enough uncertainty around the link between smoking and lung cancer, then people would continue to consume their product. But as opinion poll after opinion poll comes in, it is starting to look like the link between belief in human-caused climate change and support for low carbon policies is nowhere near as direct.

There is no escaping the fact that there is a major disparity between the level of certainty expressed by climate scientists and by the general public about the basic facts of climate change. It seems counter-intuitive that people dispute anthropogenic climate change, but are willing to modify their behaviour to prevent it. It seems bizarre that 73% of the BBC poll respondents who had heard about ‘climategate’ and IPCC glaciers error claimed that their views about climate change had not been altered. But this is what the polls are telling us.

The merchants of doubt will soon run out of steam – for all the uncertainty they can generate about human impact on the climate, public support for mitigating climate change remains high.

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On the Guardian’s Comment is Free, the Communities Minister Eric Pickles has made some bold claims about ‘human nature’ in introducing the coalition’s household recycling policy. Under the new policy, householders will be rewarded for recycling with points that can be cashed in at ‘local businesses’ such as Marks and Spencer and Cineworld. Bravely summarising decades of behavioural research in just two sentences, Pickles states that:

“There are some basic truths about human nature that the previous government found hard to grasp. If you want people to do something, then it’s always much more effective to give them support and encouragement – a nudge in the right direction – than to tell them what to do and then punish them if they don’t obey.”

He later goes on to claim:

“What’s really important about this scheme is that it treats people like adults. There’s no compulsion to participate, no penalties for opting out. It works because there’s a clear incentive to get involved. You put something in, you get something back. This is the Big Society in action.”

Unfortunately, the one basic truth about human nature that Pickles overlooks is the one that seems most essential for the Big Society: people respond to what others around them are doing, and don’t just behave in a rational, individually beneficial way. If they did, far less people would play the lottery.

Much more important than any individual-level cost/benefit analysis of whether to recycle is whether a particular behaviour is seen as socially acceptable. In several psychological studies, the power of social norms has been demonstrated for environmental behaviours like recycling and home energy management. In a famous example, American researchers showed that energy-hungry households reduced their energy consumption when they had access to information about the average usage in their area. They saw their high-energy use as socially undesirable, and fell into line.

Nobody wants to be seen as the gas guzzler in a neighbourhood full of waste-watchers, so reward or punishment schemes may be missing the point if they are aimed at individuals rather than tapping into the huge potential of social comparisons to generate behaviour change. People are more likely to compete to out-do each other than they are for a few pounds off their supermarket bill, and another recent psychological study showed how important people think it is to be ‘seen to be green’. Shoppers were willing to pay a premium for products with an environmental advantage – although only if they thought that other people were watching.

But there are also deeper reasons for not creating a direct link between recycling rates and financial rewards. Studies by Tim Kasser have shown that people who are highly materialistic are the least likely to act in a pro-environmental way. Paying people to recycle promotes the very value (material gain) that is likely to inhibit more ambitious changes in behaviour, or support for policies that may in fact cost people money in low-carbon taxes.

In short, Pickles’ Big Society recycling plan has no societal component, promotes the environmentally and socially antagonistic value of individual material gain as a reason for recycling, and amounts to paying people to put out their rubbish. Is that the best the Big Society can do?

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How much of what is recorded as scepticism about the scientific reality of climate change is simply a desire for it not to be true – or at the very least, for it not to be as bad as the scientists and politicians say? This is a question that cannot easily be answered.

When people are motivated not to believe something, they are also motivated not to acknowledge that their non-belief is anything other than rational. But two fishy tales shed some light on one type of climate change scepticism, and highlight a major challenge for climate change communicators: how do you persuade someone to believe something that they really don’t want to believe?

Fishy Tale 1

Last month in Doha, delegates at the Washington Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species voted against a ban on fishing bluefin tuna. The decision was widely condemned by environmental groups, and in the Guardian, George Monbiot described the refusal to acknowledge the critically endangered state of the bluefin tuna as:

“Olympic-class denial, a flat refusal to look reality in the face.”

Even the most casual follower of Guardian etiquette knows what happens next – when a writer uses the ‘d’ word, the comment threads fill up with red-faced, indignant micro-treatises on the inappropriateness and offensiveness of the term ‘denial’. But on this occasion, the comments were broadly supportive of Monbiot’s stance. Yes, agreed some of the very same posters who usually follow his pieces with streams of bile (hello CheshireRed), overfishing of the bluefin tuna was a serious problem and should be stopped.

Fishy Tale 2

‘Bottomfeeder’, by Taras Grescoe is a book about the overfishing and ultimate demise of many of the world’s fisheries. Combining barely-believable statistics about the collapse of once abundant oceanic ecosystems (some estimates put European fish populations at 5% of their first-recorded levels) and interviews with countless fishermen and traders in ports and harbours around the world, Grescoe builds up a bewildering picture of the world’s seas.

While the evidence is anecdotal rather than statistical, it is striking just how many of the fishermen (and it is primarily men) that Grescoe speaks to are adamant that climate change is warming their seas and driving away their catch. Their belief that the seas are warming is correct – but the biggest impact on the number of fish they are pulling out of the sea is intensive overfishing. Far fewer of Grescoe’s interviewees acknowledge this – blaming seals, foreigners, and global warming before conceding that perhaps their methods of fishing might be having an effect.

What The Fishy Tales Tell Us

So, notorious Guardian message board climate change sceptic CheshireRed solemnly supports the protestors who seek to prevent overfishing of the bluefin tuna, and accepts that those who are responsible for the overfishing are in denial about the cause of the problem – but does not accept the overwhelming scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change. Conversely, the fishermen responsible for overfishing happily accept climate change but doubt that their actions have any impact on the state of the world’s fisheries.

I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that CheshireRed (and his message board buddies) are not sea fishermen, with a vested interest in underplaying the impact of overfishing. However, like most of us in the developed world they have a personal stake in climate change being shown to be a scam – it would eliminate the need to change our high-consuming lifestyles.   Some people – for economic or ideological reasons – have a more formal desire to reject the science of climate change. Sea fishermen have an obvious and powerful motive for downplaying the importance of overfishing as a cause of lower catches. What seems obvious to the rest of us is difficult for them to admit. We are all fishermen when it comes to facing up to climate change.

Without a sensible grasp of the reasons for scepticism, an awful lot of effort could be expended without any discernible effect.

Not all scepticism about climate change is attributable to a ‘fisherman effect’ — but we urgently need a more sophisticated typology of scepticism. Re-framing the terms of the debate and refining our methods of communication will work for some types of scepticism, but not for others. Without a sensible grasp of the reasons for scepticism, an awful lot of effort could be expended without any discernible effect. There is a great deal of interest in how to communicate cimate change more effectively. But how do you go about persuading a fisherman that he needs to catch less fish?

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It is an increasingly familiar formula – a climate poll is released, the results are interpreted and analysed, and both sides claim victory. The initial analyses are inevitably the ones that scream ‘controversy’, while more considered accounts emerge at a later date. But while the polls may tell us something about public opinion, what do they tell us about climate change?

The celebrated philosopher of language Paul Grice formulated a now famous set of rules, or ‘maxims’ to explain how people make inferences. According to Grice, sentences and conversations obey a simple set of rules that allow us to make sense of what people are saying (e.g. be informative, be relevant, say as much – but only as much – as you need). For example, if you were to receive a reference letter supporting an application for an administrative post that stated ‘Chris is polite and punctual’ but omitted to mention his administrative skills, what would you infer? Nothing negative was said about Chris, but from what wasn’t said, you infer that Chris might not be the best man for the job. Grice’s maxims dictate that if there was something else positive to say about Chris, you would say it – as it would be relevant and informative. The writer of the letter knows this, and so does the reader. Grice’s legacy is that there is an enormous amount of work going on behind the scenes when we read, speak or write a sentence. We are experts at reading between the lines.

What, then, is the implication of repeatedly asking the public, in opinion poll after opinion poll, whether they believe in climate change? Our internal inference-making machine tells us that this must be a relevant question to ask – as otherwise people would not be asking it. Almost by definition, opinion polls concern ‘controversial’ topics. Questions where there is consensus about the answer simply don’t get posed over and over again – which is why no-one solicits our opinions on whether smoking causes lung cancer. But despite an unequivocal statement of consensus from the scientific community that human activity is exacerbating and accelerating climate change, we are regularly pestered for our endorsement of this fact. The very act of asking the public whether they believe in climate change presupposes that this is a question that does not have a settled answer.

Of course, there are many questions about climate change that do not have a settled answer. What is a ‘safe’ level at which to stabilise greenhouse gases in the atmosphere? How many climate change refugees will there be in 2050? Scientists, politicians and demographers can make attempts to quantify answers to these questions, but there is not an absolute consensus. Therefore, while most of us have no particular expertise with which to answer them, they seem reasonable questions to ask. Our answers might be implausible, inaccurate or mis-informed – but at least they are questions which have not already been comprehensively answered.

For sure, there is a steady and respectable stream of academic research that seeks to understand what the public know about climate change, and how attitudes towards it are changing. Typically, this sort of research is aimed at documenting the gap between public and scientific opinion on climate change. It seeks to understand why people are sceptical about climate change, and proposes strategies for increasing people’s environmental awareness and behaviour. This kind of research is an essential tool for increasing public engagement with climate change, although too often its findings are fed into the denial industry’s fact-mangling machines. Research expressing concern about an increase in scepticism is trumpeted as ‘more evidence’ that climate change is a scam – or the researchers involved are accused of “blurring the lines between research and activism”.

It is precisely this sleight of hand that makes the reporting of climate change opinion polls so problematic. First, the public are badgered for their opinion about the climate change ‘controversy’. Their responses are then used as evidence of this controversy – but what gets lost is that these are two very different controversies. The first is false and entirely manufactured – there is no scientific controversy about whether human activity causes climate change. The second is genuine but no less manufactured – there is substantial controversy about whether people believe in climate change (although, as this article makes clear there is still a clear majority of people who understand that climate change is occurring). But is it any surprise that there is controversy when the Daily Telegraph publishes wilfully misleading articles asking “Are you a climate sceptic? Does the current cold snap have any bearing on the climate change debate?”  The Telegraph team understand perfectly well the distinction between weather and climate, but they choose to blur the lines to stoke the fires of climate change denial. Just posing the question presupposes that the answer is in dispute. Manufactured evidence of public uncertainty is splattered like mud over climate change research, so that even the clearest statements of scientific fact become obscured by the dubious wisdom of message board lynch mobs.

There is much to be said about the motivations for conducting non-academic research into public opinion on climate change. Some of it is undoubtedly well-meaning, but polls commissioned by newspapers are only looking for one thing: controversy. That isn’t to say that news outlets wouldn’t be happy with the ‘controversial’ finding that 100% of people accept climate change is real. But most of the time, the controversy is found by contrasting public opinion with the claims of the IPCC, or government policy. Of course, the extent to which people support a particular policy on climate change is a completely legitimate and necessary question to ask. Politics is a popularity contest – but science is not. This is the second major distinction that is routinely blurred in discussions of attitudes towards climate change: scepticism about climate change (the process), and dispute over its implications.

What climate change will mean for our lives – for society – is completely up for grabs. Here, disputes divide down long-running ideological lines. Some distrust the very concept of a global political agreement – and perhaps with good reason. Political agreements have a habit of being ineffective and inequitable. But the fact that there is rampant distrust of politics and politicians cannot be a reason to be sceptical about climate change. How much of the reported public scepticism towards climate change is in fact simply a good old fashioned rejection of political/corporate sincerity, coupled with an unwillingness to accept lifestyle changes?

Academic research is well placed to answer these sorts of questions, and is starting to do exactly that. But the headline screaming ‘scepticism on the increase’ tells us very little – other than that whether or not climate change is ‘real’ is a question that doesn’t have a settled answer. There is no controversy about whether human activity causes climate change. So why are we still asking the question?

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“With only four decades to go, the UK is already losing the climate change mitigation battle. The greenhouse gas emission targets set by the Government require a rate of reduction that has never been achieved by even the most progressive nations in the world. If the UK is realistically going to reach an outcome equivalent to a reduction of 80% by 2050, we need to start mapping out an alternative solution using all engineering methods possible and not only relying on mitigation.”

Can you see where this is going yet? Yes, despite (or maybe because) of the imminent Copenhagen negotiations – still the world’s best chance at initiating a package of mitigation measures to prevent dangerous climate change – the engineers have written off the prospect of the UK achieving its targets. The only way, say the engineers, of remedying this situation is to consider ‘all engineering methods possible’. They might want to modify that to read ‘all engineering methods possible and not yet possible’, because what they mean is geoengineering, advocating what they call a Mitigation, Adaptation and Geoengineering (MAG) approach to climate change.

Geoengineering is the large scale, intentional manipulation of the earth’s climate. Several different approaches have been suggested, ranging from the blasting of trillions of tiny mirrors into space, to the depositing of nanoparticles of iron filings in the sea. The hope is that these arch-industrial strategies will reduce temperatures by deflecting sunlight (space mirrors) or absorbing CO2 (iron filings in the sea). All the technologies are as yet unproven, and there are significant and considerable concerns about the social and ethical implications of geoengineering. Who will decide what gets geoengineered and when? What about the potential for international conflict? Will it act as a giant distraction from mitigation? Is it a massively lucrative form of geopolitical dominance?

While it is no surprise to find the IMechE offering a gung-ho endorsement of the prospect of a planet covered with climate change-fighting machines, what is worrying is the way in which they make their argument – we have already lost the fight against climate change, and so There Is No Alternative (TINA).

TINA was last seen adorning Margaret Thatcher’s pale blue suit like a lapel of honour. According to the free market ideology she endorsed, there was no alternative to neoliberal capitalism – and so we might as well open wide and glug it down like the well behaved non-society we were. TINA sometimes masqueraded as the Washington Consensus – the now discredited economic imperialism of the United States. In whatever guise TINA appeared, however, she had a similar effect – to draw artificial boundaries around the acceptable lines of debate. The IMechE have made good use of its falsely dichotomous appeal – do you want dangerous climate change, or do you want geoengineering?

The TINA argument is all the more concerning given the outrageous back-peddling on climate policy currently being exhibited by the UK and the US. With both Miliband and Obama issuing dismissals of the possibility of legally binding agreement at Copenhagen, the TINA argument for approaches like geoengineering becomes stronger. Just like the neoliberal enthusiasts of the 1980s, advocates of geoengineering can point to the failure of the alternatives and conclude that draconian measures are needed. This is all the more reason for politicians such as Miliband and Obama not to frighten the horses by declaring the December negotiations (legally) dead in the water.

Of course, TINA was always a fallacy. But the simple act of repeating it helped to ensure that it became prophetic. Similarly, the gradual mainstreaming of the notion that ‘Copenhagen is already dead’ or the idea that ‘UK climate change targets have already failed’ will make them more likely to become true. What is ‘impossible’ is constantly and continually redefined by society. It is absurd, not two years into the UK climate change targets, to write them off as ‘impossible’. What could that possibly mean?

The engineers say that meeting the targets would require emissions reductions on a scale not yet achieved by any industrialised nation. But what did they think it was going to require? Of course preventing dangerous climate change will take us into new, uncharted, unprecedented waters: The challenge is to ensure that global and national agreements on climate change are equitable and fair. Arguing that the UK cannot possibly meet its mitigation targets without geoengineering is like refusing to stop gorging on a cake while demanding that a machine is invented that can perform colonic irrigation as we continue to eat.

We don’t have to keep eating the cake. There Is An Alternative.

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On these pages, Tim Holmes has already questioned some of the methodological assumptions of the study, and the predictable media response to it[2]. But there is a further problem with the logic of the report that raises a serious communication challenge for environmental campaigners: Using money as a motivator of sustainable behaviour simply doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

First things first – no-one is denying that financial considerations are not an enormous influence on behaviour. They clearly are – every time you decide to get up extra-early to get a cheaper train, you are making a decision based on how much it costs you. The findings of the IPPR report back this up. Their participants expressed a desire to save money, and felt that the prospect of saving money would make them more likely to engage in sustainable behaviour.

So – people do things because of financial reasons, and would be more likely to be green if it saved them money. Why not give the people what they want? Tell the world that saving energy will save them money!

There’s only one slight problem with this insight – sustainable behaviour doesn’t always come cheap. Certainly, there are times when saving energy also saves money (in general using less means spending less). But there are plenty of green behaviours that cannot easily be packaged as financially attractive. Taking the train to the Costa Del Sol is not cheaper than flying there – the low-carbon choice is not always the low-cost option. In the future we might hope that the ‘polluter pays’ principle is accurately reflected in the prices of the world’s commodities, but for now being green isn’t necessarily the cheapest game in town. It’s a tough sell during a recession, which is what the IPPR study found. But what’s the alternative – to lie?

Of course, you might imagine that once people have started ‘going green’ (tempted into some sustainable behaviours by the prospect of saving money), a momentum will be created that will propel them into other green actions – even if they’re not so cost effective. However, as Tom Crompton at the WWF has documented in detail, this assumption is something of a myth[3]. Some key social-psychological theories and empirical evidence simply do not support the idea that people will spontaneously progress from ‘simple and painless’ behaviour changes to less simple (and perhaps more financially painful) steps in the future. If anything, the reinforcement of the link between saving money and sustainable behaviours is likely to act as a barrier to further changes in the future – when the money saving stops, so does the behaviour.

And as if it wasn’t bad enough that the link between saving money and saving the environment was tenuous, evidence from studies conducted by Ken Sheldon in the US suggests that people with materialistic values (that is, people who value money, possessions, and power) are the least likely to engage in environmental behaviour[4]. In an experiment where people could divide up environmental resources in whichever way they chose, highly materialistic people exhibited more environmentally destructive behaviour. Unfortunately, emphasising the link between money and sustainable behaviour fails on every level.

So – what’s the alternative? The solution advocated by Tom Crompton, Joe Brewer and other contributors to the Identity Campaigning website is to promote so-called ‘intrinsic’ motivations for engaging in environmental behaviour (such as the interconnectedness of humans and nature) – because this will lead to longer lasting and more embedded behavioural changes[5]. This approach is appealing, as it is difficult to dispute that if more people led lives that were based on respecting the environment and valuing nature, pro-environmental behaviour would be more prevalent.

However, while this vision of value-based sustainability is a desirable goal, attempting to translate it into reality is a challenge. Governments and NGOs are wary of being seen to dictate values to the electorate (never mind that the values of consumption-based growth are promoted every second of every day – they’re so embedded in the fabric of society they’re invisible). And on a practical level, it’s awkward and unfamiliar for most people (campaigners or otherwise) to link mundane behaviours like driving a car to abstract concepts like ‘valuing nature’ or ‘intrinsic motivations’.

There is a compromise which acknowledges that money matters in people’s decision-making, but doesn’t constantly crank-up the link between saving money and sustainable behaviour. The fact is that people will work out for themselves whether something is in their financial interest – they don’t need campaigners to do it for them. Far better is to use money more subtly – by removing financial barriers to behaviour change (such as governments offering subsidised loft or cavity wall insulation).

The message here is not that installing insulation will save you money (although it will), or that the reason for caring about climate change is that it will be good for your wallet. It is that green intentions will be reciprocated by the government. Here the lower cost encourages participation, but doesn’t reduce sustainable behaviour to a cost-benefit analysis that in the long run is doomed to fail. The idea of reciprocation also fits in well with the sort of values that are linked with pro-environmental behaviour – people who care about fairness also tend to care about the environment.[6]

We can’t ignore the fact that money motivates behaviour, but we can approach it in a more sophisticated way. We know that people are constrained by financial concerns, but that promoting the link between saving money and saving the environment is problematic in the long run. Could the idea of reciprocation permit both of these issues to be addressed?

[2] http://climatesafety.org/misrepresenting-public-opinion/

[3] http://www.wwf.org.uk/research_centre/research_centre_results.cfm?uNewsID=2728

[4] Sheldon, K.M., & McGregor, H. (2000) Extrinsic value orientation and the tragedy of the commons. Journal of Personality 68, 383–411.

[5] http://www.identitycampaigning.org/2009/09/550/

[6] Schultz, P.W., Gouveia, V.V., Cameron, L.D., Tankha, G., Schmuck, P. & Franek, M. (2005). Values and their Relationship to Environmental Concern and Conservation Behavior. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 36, 457–475.

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