Is climate persuasion a fool’s errand?

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Graph Source: GMU Center for Climate Change Communication

Climate psychology has come a long way. And it has a long way to go

By Mark Harris

It happens every day. A friend or colleague talks enthusiastically about buying a new gas car, or shivers theatrically on a chilly day and says: “So much for global warming.” Now you’re faced with a choice. Do you engage them with facts and arguments or just smile neutrally and change the subject?

Climate change, perhaps, used to be a topic where reasoned discussion was possible, particularly if people were lacking basic facts about atmospheric chemistry and the scale of fossil fuel use. These days, it can be more of a conversational third rail than religion or sport.

Here we tackle two intertwined questions. First, there’s now been two decades of research on environmental psychology. What have we learned about changing people’s minds on climate? But there’s a second, larger, question looming in the background: Does moving towards a decarbonized planet need everyone to buy into a science-based view anyway?

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Yes. The Conversation Is Over

1. The needle is stuck. Despite a decade of firestorms, scientific unanimity, and consistent messaging, the proportion of Americans who accept the reality of global warming has barely shifted over the past 10 years—it’s still onlyaround 70%, according to the latest poll from George Mason University’s Center for Climate Change Communication. And of those, about a third think it’s mostly due to natural changes in the environment. (That’s lower than the rest of the world at 80%, but not by much). Remarkably, given the actual rise ofclimate disasters, the proportion of Americans who say they have personally experienced the effects of global warming actually decreased from about 70% in 2015 to 50% this year.

Chart showing a decreasing proportion of Americans reporting that they have personally experienced the effects of global warming
Source: GMU Center for Climate Change Communication
2. Look! Here’s something shiny! We humans are easily distracted. The Yale Program on Climate Communication recently tested four videos aiming to persuade viewers to transition away from fossil fuels. Some just stated the facts, others used ethical and moral arguments. It turns out that all were equally effective at changing viewers’ beliefs—but only for a limited time. After three weeks, their effect had fallen by half or more. And that’s in the absence of negative messaging. Researchers at the University of Southern California exposed people to a range of statements about the climate, including some that were factually incorrect. Sadly, a single exposure to a false claim about climate change was sufficient to make it seem truer later on, they found. “That’s even the case for people who strongly endorse climate science and who can identify the claim as a climate-skeptic claim when explicitly asked,” says one of the researchers.

3. Pay to play. The best way to approach climate deniers might be not trying to persuade them but simply paying them to do the right thing. A 2023 meta-study by researchers from the University of Gothenburg found that offering financial incentives was one of the most effective strategies to promote climate-friendly behaviors. They noted that incentives such as cash payments, coupons, or reimbursements showed a consistently positive effect across all 73 of the primary studies analyzed.

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No. But The Conversation Needs To Change

1. Make the future real. A massive global study, published in Science Advances, tested 11 expert-crowdsourced interventions on nearly 60,000 people across 63 countries. Unsurprisingly, the researchers found that correcting misperceptions about other people’s climate beliefs wasn’t very effective. “What mattered more than what other people are saying or doing, was thinking about one’s children and their futures,” says study team member Madalina Vlasceanu of New York University. One winning strategy was asking people to write a letter to a future generation. But don’t get too excited—letter writing only boosted support for climate policy by less than 3%. A second study from Sweden took that idea one step further, asking participants to split resources between those alive today and their descendants in the future. People who allocated more to their future offspring were also more likely to support climate policies in the here and now.

2. Two strong voices: experts and survivors. A recent German survey found that respondents were willing to listen to complex expert advice on the climate, even when they would forego a shopping voucher to do so. A Nature paper from last year agreed that telling people that scientists almost unanimously agree that human-caused climate change is happening can help nudge their thinking. An older (2018) Yale study also emphasized the importance of feeling a human connection with the victims of climate disasters. It found that seeing others experience the impacts of global warming had the highest correlation with people changing their opinions on climate.

3. Breaking the spiral of silence. About a third of Americans never talk about global warming, according to the Center for Climate Change Communication’s latest survey. Yale researchers call this “the spiral of silence.” People concerned about the climate avoid voicing their worry because they rarely hear others discussing the topic, and thus the spiral continues. This great article in Time explains why face-to-face conversations are one of the most powerful ways to change people minds, citing research that a single 10-minute chat succeeded in reducing transphobia for months. And the good news is that the number of conversations about climate change is slowly edging up.
Source: GMU Center for Climate Change Communication

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What To Keep An Eye On

1. Hollywood. Inspired by the Bechdel-Wallace test, which measures gender representation, the Climate Reality Check keeps a running tally of whether our climate reality is being represented in films, TV shows, and other cultural conversations. Of this year’s Oscar nominees for Best Picture, only one, The Wild Robot passed the test. There are now even dedicated consultancies, such as Climate Spring and Good Energy, that aim to help studios integrate climate storytelling into new productions.

2. Non-governmental sources become the new gold standard. US federal agencies like NOAA, NASA, the EPA and the Department of the Interior used to be rock-solid go-to sources for impartial scientific information on climate change. With the switch in administration, that is changing fast. If you want data to back up your arguments, look to the IPCC, the UN Environment Programme,The Nature Conservancy, and Our World in Data.

3. Bot or not? “It is highly likely that AI is already being used by actors on different sides of climate change discussions,” write two New Zealand researchers in a recent edition of Nature’s Climate Action journal. They point out that AI can produce highly emotive fake images, flood social media channels with convincing misinformation, and harass or coerce individuals. “Every example could immediately be deployed to influence climate change decisions at low cost and with little technical expertise,” they warn. Climate campaign organization Global Witness has already identified dozens of bot-like accounts spreading climate lies on X.

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