More bad news: the risk of neglecting emotional responses to climate change information

If one does not look into the abyss, one is being wishful by simply not confronting the truth about our time. … On the other hand, it is imperative that one not get stuck in the abyss. Robert Jay Lifton (1986) Introduction Listening to climate change communicators, advocates, and scientists, there is a growing frustration that politicians and the public don't pay more attention to the issue. In their attempts to ring the alarm bells more fiercely, many are tempted either to make the issue scarier or to inundate people with more information, believing that if people only understood the urgency of global warming, they would act or demand more action. When the desired response then fails to materialize, they get disappointed, yet plow ahead undeterred. Surely, if people aren't getting the message, we must give it more loudly! Yet is “not getting the message” really the problem? And is scarier and more information the answer? Almost every new story about global warming brings more bad news. In 2005 alone, people opened the morning papers to stories that warming could be far worse than previously projected, that our emissions are committing us to warming and sea-level rise for decades to centuries even if we could stop all of them point-blank, today. Increasingly urgent is the news about the rapidly accelerating melting of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice shields.

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