For most time of the 20th century, winter brought an annual ritual to Princeton, New Jersey. The lake carnegie collapses, and the skates come to their bright surface. These days, ice is rarely thick to support anyone wearing skates, because Princeton’s winter has heated 4 degrees Fahrenheit Since 1970. It is a lost tradition that Grace Liu was associated with the warming climate in 2020 as an undergraduate at the University of Princeton, interviewed the residents for a long time and excavated through a newspaper archives to record the lake’s snow condition.
“People certainly saw that they were able to get out of the lake at least,” Liu said, which is now a PhD. Students at Carnegie Melan University. “However, they do not necessarily associate this trend with climate change.”
When the alumni magazine of the university depicted its research in the winter of 2021, Comments section The bottom of the moonlight was filled with evil memories of skating, pushing the crowd to play hockey, and drinking hot chocolate by frozen lakeside. Liu began to be surprised: Can such direct, intestine loss climate change make people feel more vivid?
That question arose Study, Break through apathy about climate change,
Liu worked with professors in Princeton as people responded to two separate influence. One gradually extended the winter temperature of a fictional city over time, while the other presented the same warming trend in a black or white manner: the lake either froze in any year, or did not. Those who saw the second chart had a sudden change in climate change.
Both charts represent the same amount of winter warming, simply presented differently. “We are not hoodwinking,” said Rachit Dubey, a co-author of the study, who is now a professor of communication at the University of California, Los Angeles. “We are really showing them the same trend, just in different formats.”
Black-or-white presentation was correct on a series of strong reaction experiments, even where a trend line was placed on a scattered plot of temperature to clarify the warming super. To ensure the results translated into the broad world, the researchers also saw how people reacted to the actual data of the lake and the temperature from the towns of America and Europe rises and the same results. “Psychology effects are sometimes fickle,” Dubey said, who did research on cognitive science for a decade. “This is one of the cleanest effects we have ever seen.”
Conclusions suggest that if scientists want to increase public urgency around climate change, they should highlight clear, concrete changes rather than slow -running trends. This may include the loss of white Christmas or outdoor summer activities canceled due to wildfire smoke.
The metaphor of “boiling frog” is sometimes used to describe how people fail to react to gradual changes in climate. The idea is that if you put a frog in boiling water, it will immediately jump out. But if you put it in room temperature water and slowly turn on the heat, the frog will not feel danger and it will boil it. Although the real frogs are really smart enough, when the water is dangerously heated, the metaphor fits humans when it comes to climate change: people adjust the temperature mentally, according to the study “distractedly rapid” increases. Previous research has found that with the climate heating, people adjust their feelings what normal on the basis of weather seems Last two to eight yearsAn event known as “shifting baseline”.
Many scientists have hoped that governments would eventually work to cut fossil fuel emissions when a particularly devastating storm, summer wave, or flood made the impact of climate change undeniable. Last year, due to weather related disasters Damage over $ 180 billion In the United States, according to the National Ocean and atmospheric administration. Yet climate change is still not torn into the rank of Americans that say they are most concerned. Prior to the 2024 presidential election, a gallop pole found that the bottom of the list of climate change was ranked near 22 issuesWell under economy, terrorism, or health care.
“The tragedy will continue to move forward in the background, but it is not happening for us to think faster to think,” Okay, this is. We just need to stop everything decisively, “Dubey said. “I think this is a even bigger threat we are facing with climate change – it never becomes crisis.”
A graph about lake-fringing data is not going to lead people to rank climate change as their top digit. But Dubey feels that if people see a compelling scene more often, it can help prevent the problem of climate change from getting out of their brain. The study of Duby shows that a cognitive reason why binary data resonates with people: It creates a mental confusion that the situation has suddenly changed, when it has actually changed slowly.
According to Jennifer Marlon, a senior research scientist at the Yale program on climate change communication, the importance of using data visualization to get an idea is often ignored. “We know that (data visual) can be powerful tools for communication, but they often recall their mark, partly because most scientists are not trained, despite the availability of many excellent resources,” Marlon said in an email. He said that binary visuals can be used to express the urgency of addressing climate change, although using them means losing complexity and prosperity from data.
The findings of the study are not only applied to cold lakes – global temperature can be conveyed in more ways. Famous “Climate stripes” view Developed by Ed Hawkins, a professor at the University of Reading in the UK, shows temperature changes with a vertical band of lines, where blue indicates years of cold and indicates red warm ones. Since the chart switchs in dark blue to dark red, it communicates the warming trend at the higher intestine level. Strips simplify a gradual tendency in the image of a binary-style that makes it easy to understand. “Our study explains why climate stripes are really so popular and resonated with people,” Dubey said.
This article appeared originally Grain grain But https://grist.org/science/Break-through- Climate- Climate- Data- Visualization- Take- Freezing-study/Grist is a non -profit, independent media organization dedicated to tell stories of climate solutions and a fair future. Leam more Grist.org,
