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Your Local Climate Influences Your Views of Global Warming
Why trust thousands of careful scientific observations when you can just ask yourself if it’s hot where you live?
About 97% of climate scientists agree that human carbon emissions are changing our planet’s climate. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, scientific consensus on climate change is comparable to the scientific consensus that smoking causes cancer. In fact, the scientific consensus on climate change is only slightly lower than the scientific consensus on whether the earth is round (it is). But despite a sea of evidence that climate change is real, many laypeople continue to believe that climate change is a myth.
There are many reasons for climate change skepticism — from wishful thinking to a lack of science education. But psychologists are learning that the automatic “rules of thumb” that people use to make snap judgments — judgmental heuristics — also influence people’s views of climate change. More specifically, for people who live in places with cool climates, the bias known as the availability heuristic fuels skepticism about global warming. The availability heuristic refers to the tendency to base our judgments on how easily something is called to mind. We all know that receiving birthday cards is more common than receiving death threats. This is because most of us have received many more…
