For a large part of the 20th century, in winter it brought an annual ritual to Princeton in the American state of New Jersey. Lake Carnegie was completely frozen, and the skaters gathered on its glossy surface. Nowadays, the ice is rarely thick enough to support someone with skates, because the Princeton winters have warmed up about 2.2 degrees Celsius since 1970, Gizmodo reports.
It is a lost tradition, which Grace Liu associated with heating the climate during the time she was a student at Princeton University in 2020. She interviewed old residents and researched the newspapers archives to create a chronicle of the claw conditions.
“People have clearly noticed that they could go more and more rarely on the lake,” said Liu, who is now a PhD student at the University of Carnegie Mellon. “However, they did not necessarily make the connection between this phenomenon and the climatic changes,” she explains.
When the Graduate Magazine of the University presented the research in the winter of 2021, the comment section was filled with nostalgic memories of skating under the moonlight, hockey matches between the crowds and the hot chocolate drunk on the frozen lake. Liu started to wonder: could such a direct, visceral loss, make climate change for people?
This question triggered her study, recently published in the magazine Nature Human Behavior, which has reached a remarkable conclusion: reducing data to a binary format – a clear “was” or “na” – can help defeat apathy from climate change.
Research on climate change has studied people's reactions
Liu collaborated with Princeton teachers to test how people react to two different graphs. One showed the winter temperatures in a fictional city gradually increasing over time, and the other had the same heating trend in a “black and white” way: the lake either frozen in a certain year or no. Those who saw the second graph perceived climatic changes as causing sudden transformations.
Both graphs reflected the same level of winter heating, only presented differently. “We do not fool anyone,” said Rachit Dubey, co -author of the study, who is now a communication professor at California University in Los Angeles. “We show them the same trend literally, only in different formats,” he explains.
Both graphs demonstrate the same heating trend, but the data presented as gradual temperatures are less striking than those presented binary, with the frozen lake or not.
The strong reaction to the black and white presentation maintained in several experiments, including one in which a tendency line has been added over a graph that highlights the temperatures, to make the heating as clear as possible.
To check if the results are general, the researchers also analyzed people's reactions to real data on lake freezing and temperature increases in US and Europe and have obtained the same reactions.
“Psychological effects are sometimes capricious,” says Dubey, who has been researching cognitive sciences for a decade. “This is one of the clearest effects we have ever noticed,” the researcher points out.
The study suggests that the metaphor of “boiled frog” should be thrown on the window
The discoveries suggest that if scientists want to increase the feeling of public emergency related to climatic changes, they should highlight them clearly and concretely, instead of slow tendencies.
The examples that could be used include snow loss or cancellation of summer summer activities due to smoke caused by vegetation fires.
The metaphor of “boiled frog” is sometimes used to describe how people do not react to gradual climate change. The idea is that if you put a frog in boiling water, it will jump out immediately. But if you put it in water at room temperature and gradually increase the temperature, the frog will not make the danger and will be boiled.
Although the frogs are actually smart enough to jump when the water becomes dangerously hot, the metaphor suits people when it comes to climatic changes: they adapt mentally to “alarmingly fast” temperature increases.
Previous research has shown that, as the climate warms up, people adjust their perception of what is “normal”, based in the last two to eight years-a phenomenon known as “changing the reference bases” (Shifting Baselines).
Photo article: Dreamstime.com.
