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Steam billowing from the cooling towers of Vattenfall’s Jaenschwalde brown coal power station behind wind turbines near Cottbus, eastern Germany Dec. 2, 2009. REUTERS/Pawel Kopczynski
For some time, social science researchers have been studying an oddity about the U.S. — compared with many other nations, we’re a hotbed of global warming doubt and denial. Accordingly, and to counteract this, a variety of messages or ways of “re-framing” the issue have been proposed, often with the goal of appealing to the ideology of political conservatives, which is where most of the doubt lies.
Some of the most popular framing ideas include talking about climate change in the context of economic opportunity (solving climate change will lead to a clean energy boom), national security (not solving it will make the world a dangerous place), faith-based ethics (we need to be good stewards of the Creation) and public health (climate change will make us sicker, or lead to the spread of diseases).
Now, however, a new study suggests not only that these messages may not be particularly effective, but that messages espousing climate change doubt or denial — which are ever-present in the din of public debate and discourse — appear to have considerably more impact.
“The positive frames really don’t move the needle at all, and the presence of the denial counter-frame seems to have a suppressive or a negative effect on people’s climate change belief,” says Aaron McCright, a researcher at Michigan State University who conducted the research with three university colleagues. The study is just out in the journal Topics in Cognitive Science.
