For much of the twentieth century, winter brought an annual ritual to Princeton, New Jerseyerze. Lake Carnegie frozen solid, and patinians flocked to its bright surface. These days, the ice is rarely thick enough to support any wearing skates as Princeton’s winters have warm 4 degrees Fahrenheit Since 1970. It has been a lost tradition that Grace Liu has linked to the hot climate as a student at Princeton University in 2020, interviewing for a long time residents and digging through journal archives to create a record of the ice conditions of the lake.
“People have certainly noticed that they were able to go out less to the lake,” said Liu, who is now a doctorate. Student at Carnegie Mellon University. “However, they did not necessarily linked this tendency to climate change.”
When the university’s ex -magazine presented its research in the winter of 2021, the Comment section Filled with witchcraft sketch memories under the moonlight, passing the crowd to play hockey, and drinking hot chocolate near the frozen lake. Liu began to wonder: could this direct, visceral loss make climate change more alive to humans?
That question came into being Her studyRecently published in the journal Nature Human Behavior, which has come to a striking conclusion: boil data in binary – strict this or that – can help Break an apathy of climate change.
Liu worked with professors at Princeton to test as people responded to two different graphics. One showed winter temperatures of a fictional city gradually increasing with time, while the other presented the same warming trend in a black or white way: the lake froze in a given year, or not. People who saw the second chart perceived climate change as causing more sudden changes.
Both skills represent the same amount of winter warming, just presented differently. “We are not hooded people,” said Rachit Dubey, co-author of the study, who is now a professor of communications at the University of California, Los Angeles. “We literally show them the same trend, only in different formats.”
The strong reaction to the black-or-white presentation held true during a series of experiments, even one, where a trend line was placed over the scattered plot of temperatures to make the warming over clear. To ensure the results translated into the wider world, researchers also watched as people reacted to actual data from freezing lakes and temperature increases from cities in the United States and Europe and gained the same results. “Psychological effects are sometimes wrong,” said Dubey, who explores cognitive science for a decade. “This is one of the purest effects we’ve ever seen.”
The findings suggest that if scientists want to increase public urgency around climate change, they must highlight clear, concrete movements instead of slowly moving trends. This could include the loss of white Christmas or outdoor summer activities canceled due to wild smoke.
The metaphor of the “boiling frog” is sometimes used to describe how people fail to react to gradual changes in the climate. The idea is that if you put a frog in boiling water, it will jump immediately. But if you put it in room-temperature water and slowly switch on the heat, the frog will not notice the danger and be boiled alive. Although true frogs are actually smart enough to get out when water is dangerously warm, the metaphor suits people when it comes to climate change: people mentally adapt to temperature increases “critically rapidly”, according to the study. Previous research has found that while the climate is warm, people adjust their sense of what seems normal on the basis of weather from the past two to eight yearsA phenomenon known as “changing bases.”
Many scientists have endured hope that governments will eventually act to cut emissions of fossil fuels when a particularly devastating hurricane, heat wave or flood has made the effects of climate change undeniable. Last year, weather-related disasters caused More than $ 180 billion damages in the United States, according to the national ocean and atmospheric administration. However, climate change has not yet inserted the ranks of what Americans say they are most careful. Prior to the 2024 presidential election, a Gallup survey found that climate change ranked near the bottom of the list of 22 topicsfar below the economy, terrorism or health care.
“Tragedies will continue to grow in the background, but it doesn’t happen fast enough for us to think, ‘well, here’s. We just have to decide to stop everything we do,'” Dubey said. “I think this is an even greater danger we face with climate change – that it never becomes the problem. ”
One graph of freezing data will not lead people to the rank of climate change as their highest issue, of course. But Dubey thinks that if people see convincing visuals more often, it could help prevent the problem of climate change from their mind. Dubey’s study shows that there is a cognitive reason why binary data resonates with people: it creates a mental illusion that the situation has changed suddenly when it actually changed gradually.
The importance of using data depictions to realize an idea is often overlooked, according to Jennifer Marlon, a senior researcher of the Yale Program communication on climate change. “We know that [data visuals] There may be powerful tools for communication, but they often miss their brand, partly because most scientists are not trained, despite the availability of many excellent resources, “Marlon said in an email. She said binary visuals could be used to convey the urgency to treat climate change, although using them tend to mean losing the complexity and wealth of the data.
The findings of the study are not valid only for frozen lakes – global temperatures can be communicated in more severe ways. The popular “Climate Stripes” Visual Developed by Ed Hawkins, a professor at the University of Reading in the UK, illustrates temperature changes with vertical bands of lines, where Blue indicates cold years and red indicates hot. As the diagram changes from deep blue to deep red, it communicates the hot trend on a more visceral level. The stripes simplify a gradual trend in a binary style image that facilitates understanding. “Our study explains why climate stripes are actually so popular and resonate with people,” Dubey said.
This article originally appeared in Gist at https://grist.org/science/break-trough-climate-apathy-data-visualization-lake-hem-freezing-study/. Grist is a non -profit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories about climate solutions and a fair future. Learn more at Grain.org.
