Behavioral scientists used to believe in the “information deficit model”—the idea that people simply didn’t know enough about climate change to take steps to reduce it. Lay out the facts clearly enough, and action to reduce our carbon emissions would inevitably follow.
Those days are long gone.
With the reality of global warming now widely accepted, another obstacle to action is looming larger than climate denial—climate despair. Or as Shannon Osaka put it in the Washington Post recently, climate doomers are replacing climate deniers.
“Climate change is typically viewed as an environmental problem rather than the psychological issue that it represents,” wrote psychologist Susan Kroger as long ago as 2011. Doubting, blame-shifting, catastrophism, and avoidance are all manifestations of our struggle to cope with something as global and all-encompassing as climate change.
• • •Apocalypse Fatigue Sets In 1. The good news about bad news is that it can be motivating—up to a point. British researchers have found that eco-horror stories, such as Carbon Brief’s terrifying roundup of the year’s most covered climate research, do increase climate anxiety but also spur people to take action. The bad news about bad news is that there seems to be a dangerous precipice that we might now be teetering over. “More than 80% of all news and mainstream media play up the issue of doomsday or catastrophe,” says Norwegian psychologist, author and politician Per Espen Stoknes. “From psychological research, we know that if you overdo the threat of catastrophe, you make people feel fear or guilt or a combination. But these two emotions are passive. They make people disconnect and avoid the topic rather than engage with it.”
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