The loudest alarm blaring all over the world right now is that of climate change—but the brains of many seem to have habituated to it.
Climate experts find themselves trapped in irony: they can predict disastrous consequences for the planet we live on, yet most people’s eyes glaze over when reading the resulting headlines. We keep scrolling and living our lives. Forests get broiled by apocalyptic infernos, turning our skies red and ravaging entire towns, and we keep scrolling. Summers become human barbecues, with more and more of us dying of heat, and we keep scrolling. Our world has become less hospitable and we seem apathetic to it.
Where does climate apathy come from? Researchers have attempted to answer this question using highly artificial experiments. The most promising of these studies shows us that how we present the alarming data we have can make a difference.
Because as much as climate change seems to be a problem with the outside world, it turns out to also expose the myriad of problems plaguing our inner world: the human brain.
“No generation experiences the totality of the loss”
Our brain focuses on the urgency of the now: our ancestors needed to find food now, seek shelter now, and reproduce... well, hopefully now but certainly before dying. Climate change is a tomorrow problem. Today, we have bills to pay, kids to pick up from school, and frozen meals to pop in the microwave.
There’s also the fact that climate change is an amorphous problem. A predator is flesh and blood: it can be avoided or, if necessary, fought off. But climate change can’t be physically tackled; it can’t be seen with the naked eye; and its isolated manifestations—a blaze here, a tsunami there—are not easily blamed on it. There have always been forest fires and destructive waves. What changes is the intensity, the frequency, the range, but these changes over time may not register inside the brain.
There is a distressing essay from 1995 that illustrates this using fish. The number and diversity of fish in a body of water can collapse over a long enough period of time without fishers noticing. It’s not that they don’t have eyes; it’s that when they retire, the number of fish is down from when they started, but the next generation of fishers doesn’t know. To them, this lower number is normal. They have never experienced what the lake looked like fifty years earlier.
The essay’s writer, Daniel Pauly, called it “shifting baselines syndrome.” The first time you enter an ecosystem sets the baseline for you as to what is normal; if change is slow enough, it won’t seem drastic. For Vox, David Roberts summarized it this way: “No generation experiences the totality of the loss.” The kind of major air pollution we are experiencing in summer due to forests burning is new to us; to babies born now, it will be expected. Little by little, our species gets accustomed to a worsening situation without ever fully perceiving the change. We are, in effect, boiling frogs.
Brain flaws, real and questionable
There’s a long diatribe about our collective stupidity in one of Robert A. Heinlein’s short stories which culminates in this gem: “Man is not a rational animal; he is a rationalizing animal.”
We may think our decisions are carefully weighed, but we are much more likely to take mental shortcuts or allow our emotions into the driver’s seat, justifying our choice after the fact. How we respond to news of climate change is an unfortunate example.
It demands a response, yes, but the pull of normal is hard to escape. We saw how difficult it was during the COVID-19 pandemic for people to wear masks and change their habits in the face of a debilitating disease. As soon as a feeling of safety wafted in, these measures were abandoned in order to start feeling “normal” again. With a warming planet, this same reluctance to see our lives changed prevents us from paying attention to the problem. We just want things to feel normal.
Moreover, there are predispositions among certain types of people that make them particularly unwilling to wrestle with global warming, the obvious one being that environmental apathy can just be run-of-the-mill apathy. A series of experiments showed this pretty clearly: some people are just less emotional in general and thus less emotionally engaged with the world. They’re not psychopaths; but when shown photos of either people suffering or of self-indulgent rewards, their overall response is closer to “meh” than to “OMG!” Looming threats of a planet on fire get processed in much the same way.
For others, it’s the laissez-faire mentality and aversion to government regulations they love that shift their thinking on climate change. Political conservatives and those who vote Republican in the United States are less likely to accept the science of climate change or policies proposed to mitigate this unfurling catastrophe. There’s also the problem that richer countries, which have typically contributed more to the release of greenhouse gases over the last century, are going to be the least affected by the consequences.
But you don’t have to be rich or a conservative to be perceived as apathetic on this topic. It’s hard for an individual to feel any sort of control over a headache the size of the globe, and for some of us a sort of “anticipatory mourning” has settled in. Renee Aron Lertzman reports on her experience speaking to local residents of the Great Lakes region in a book chapter called “The Myth of Apathy.” Their seeming lack of caring was a defense mechanism against unresolvable anxiety. When a resident spoke of a river or beach nearby, “it was with nostalgia,” she wrote, “as if the site itself no longer existed.” They were making their peace with a future event because they felt powerless to stop it.
Psychologists have pointed to a number of “brain flaws” to help explain this climate apathy, with concepts like loss aversion, optimism bias, and our desire for instant gratification being proposed. There is a seemingly infinite list of cognitive biases to pick from: our brain is riddled with problems when it attempts to think clearly. We should, however, be aware of the fact that some of these alleged biases come from questionable studies, while others have been debunked. And while explaining away a complicated phenomenon like climate apathy with “this one little way your brain tricks you” feels neat, it is a gross oversimplification.
Beyond armchair psychologizing, there have been scientific studies done to help override climate apathy. The problem? They are highly contrived.
Either it happened or it didn’t
You can test interventions to break people out of their apathy by seeing how much physical effort they’re willing to put into solving climate change after a given intervention... but if the physical effort you’re measuring is clicking a lot of boxes on a computer screen inside of ten seconds, I’m not sure this translates to the real world. Ditto when you are showing online participants written statements to change their minds but none of these texts come from partisan sources so as not to muddy the waters. In real life, people listen to the politicians and influencers they like, so again, how useful is this research?
This is a problem in experimental psychology. When your aim is to control as many variables as possible, you end up creating situations that are so divorced from reality that your results have no bearing on it.
One paper that did, however, make me hopeful was one on data visualization from last year. When talking about climate change, we often convert the raw numbers we have into a graphic to make it easier to understand and see trends. In this study, scientists demonstrated that showing graphs of increasing temperatures over time wasn’t that effective to get people to see the impact of climate change; instead, what worked best were graphs that could be called “either it happened or it didn’t.”
An example they give is a chart spanning decades that indicates if a particular lake froze that year (which results in a dot at the top of the graph) or if it didn’t (which results in a dot at the bottom of the graph). Either it happened or it didn’t. The people enrolled in the study were better able to grasp that, over time, the lake froze less and less. They noticed what appeared to be a sudden shift. There was no sudden shift, to be clear; the change was gradual, because climate change itself is gradual, but they thought they could spot where on the graph the lake started freezing much more rarely than before. The human brain has a hard time understanding incremental change. If we can present real data in a way that makes the change more obvious, we may be able to activate people on this issue.
The problem with perpetual growth
Thankfully, climate apathy appears to be draining from our collective minds, much like, if you’ll pardon the unfortunate comparison, a melting glacier. There’s a famous and quite arresting quote (the source of which I was unable to track down): “Climate change will manifest as a series of disasters viewed through phones with footage that gets closer and closer to where you live until you’re the one filming it.” More and more people are filming the destructive manifestations of our warming planet. More and more people are forced to care. This need to experience climate change firsthand has cost us a lot of time, however, to mitigate the damage. The time to fix a known leak in your boat is not three hours away from shore while your feet are submerged; still, better late than never.
We can improve our society to prevent some of the potential damage and we should also adapt to the damages we cannot stop. Fossil fuels are not the future. The oil industry has internally acknowledged since the middle of the 20th century that its product would cause catastrophic changes to our environment, and petrochemical companies started to weaponize doubt in the 1980s to ensure their enrichment—yet another reason why some people don’t seem to care: they have come to believe the propaganda of oil companies.
A big problem like climate change requires a big assessment of how we live our lives on this planet. As many have pointed out, we need to interrogate our “perpetual growth” system that demands of every corporation that the line keep going up quarter after quarter. Unlimited growth spoils the basket of our limited planetary resources. One action we can take is to keep climate change top of mind when heading to the voting booth.
As for how to move more people out of apathy and into doing something, every tool in our kit should be mobilized. Emotional pleas will work on some but not others. Binary data visualizations—the lake either froze or didn’t freeze that year—will work on others but not some. Complex problems demand a battery of solutions.
Apathy does not imply disinterest. It can be a defensive mechanism. We all need to allow ourselves grace in how we deal with a problem of unprecedented proportion.
Take-home message:
- Some of the reasons that explain why many people do not seem to care about climate change include: our brain’s focus on solving today’s problems; the fact that climate change feels big and intangible; the relative slowness of the changes; and our desire to keep our lifestyle the same.
- Some people’s apathy can be explained by the fact that they are less emotional in general; that they are politically conservative; or that they feel powerless to stop it.
- Recent research shows that how we present climate data can better convey what is happening with our environment.
