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Hear no climate evil
OPINION
Hear no climate evil We’ll never tackle climate change unless we take into account how humans assimilate unwelcome information, says George Marshall DANIEL KAHNEMAN is not hopeful. “I am very sorry,” he told me, “but I am deeply pessimistic. I really see no path to success on climate change.” Kahneman won the 2002 Nobel prize in economics for his research on the psychological biases that distort rational decision- making. One of these is “loss aversion”, which means that people are far more sensitive to losses than gains. He regards climate change as a perfect trigger: a distant problem that requires sacrifices now to avoid uncertain losses far in the future. This combination is exceptionally hard for us to accept, he told me. Kahneman’s views are widely shared by cognitive psychologists. As Daniel Gilbert of Harvard University says: “A psychologist could barely dream up a better scenario for paralysis.” People from other disciplines also seem to view climate change as a “perfect” problem. Nicholas Stern, author of the influential Stern Review on the economics of climate change, describes it as the “perfect market failure”. Philosopher Stephen Gardiner of the University of Washington in Seattle says it is a “perfect moral storm”. Everyone, it seems, shapes climate change in their own image. Which points to the real problem: climate change is exceptionally amorphous. It provides us with no defining qualities that would give it a clear identity: no deadlines, no geographic location, no single cause or solution and, critically, no obvious enemy. Our brains 24 | NewScientist | 16 August 2014
scan it for the usual cues that predictions set two generations we use to process and evaluate in the future and endless talk of information about the world, but uncertainty. The latest report find none. And so we impose our from the Intergovernmental own. This is a perilous situation, Panel on Climate Change uses leaving climate change wide open the word “uncertain” more than to another of Kahneman’s biases – once per page. an “assimilation bias” that bends Discussions about economics, information to fit people’s meanwhile, invariably turn existing values and prejudices. into self defeating cost-benefit So is climate change really analyses. Stern offers a choice innately challenging, or does it between spending 1 per cent of just seem so because of the stories annual income now, or risking we have shaped around it? For losing 20 per cent of it in 50 years’ example, the overwhelming time. This language is almost and possibly hopeless struggle portrayed by the media and many “Is it any surprise that policy-makers are tempted campaigners provokes feelings to postpone action and of powerlessness. Scientists reinforce distance with computer gamble on the future?”
identical to that Kahneman used two decades earlier in his experiments on loss aversion. Is it surprising that when a choice is framed like this, policy-makers are intuitively drawn towards postponing action and taking a gamble on the future? If cost and uncertainty really are universal psychological barriers, it is hard to explain why 15 per cent of people fully accept the threat and are willing to make personal sacrifices to avert it. Most of the people in this group are left wing or environmentalists and have managed to turn climate change into a narrative that fits with their existing criticisms of industry and growth. Conservatives may justify climate inaction on the grounds of cost and uncertainty but they, too, are able to accept both as long as they speak to their core values. As former US vice-president and climate sceptic Dick Cheney said: “If there is only a 1 per cent chance of terrorists getting weapons of mass destruction, we must act as if it is a certainty.” Strongly held values can explain the convictions of those at the ends of the political spectrum, but they do not adequately explain the apparent indifference of the large majority in between. If asked, most agree that climate change is a serious threat, but without prompting they do not volunteer it. This silence is similar to that found around human rights abuses, argued the late Stanley Cohen, a sociologist at the London School of Economics. He suggested that we know very
For more opinion articles, visit newscientist.com/opinion
George Marshall is the author of Don’t Even Think About It: Why our brains are wired to ignore climate change, which is published in August in the US, September in Australia and October in the UK (Bloomsbury). He is the founder of the Climate Outreach and Information Network in Oxford, UK
One minute interview
Insight from a Rubik’s cube Manjul Bhargava explains how a moment of visual inspiration led to him winning mathematics’ most prestigious prize coming out, three of them. I just sat down and wrote out the relations between them. It was a great day! Have any of your other discoveries had unusual origins? I do tend to think about things very visually, and the Rubik’s cube is a concrete example of that visual approach. But that one is probably the most unusual and unexpected origin of all. You have proved several theorems. Do you have a favourite? Mathematicians often say that choosing a favourite theorem is like choosing one’s favourite child. Although I don’t yet have any children, I understand the sentiment. I enjoyed working on all the theorems I have proved.
Profile Manjul Bhargava has just won a Fields medal for his work on number theory. Now 40, he was one of the youngest people to be made a full professor at Princeton University, aged 28. He has extended the work of classical mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss
Does the Fields medal mean more to you than any other award you have won? Any award is a milestone, which encourages one to go further. I don’t know that I think of any award as meaning more to me personally than any other. The mathematics that led to the medal was far more exciting to me than the medal itself. The award citation says that you were inspired to extend Gauss’s law of composition in an unusual way. Can you explain what that is, and what you did? Gauss’s law says that you can compose two quadratic forms, which you can think of as a square of numbers, to get a third square. I was in California in the summer of 1998, and I had a 2 x 2 x 2 mini Rubik’s cube in my dorm room. I was just visualising putting numbers on each of the corners, and I saw these binary quadratic forms
Are there any mathematicians, living or dead, that you have particularly looked up to? My mother [Mira Bhargava, a mathematician at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York] has been a source of inspiration to me from the very beginning. She was always there to answer my questions, to encourage and support me, and she taught me how much the human mind is capable of. This year a woman, Maryam Mirzakhani at Stanford University, has finally won one of the Fields medals, after 52 consecutive male winners. How do you view this achievement? This is long overdue! Hopefully in a few years we will not even need to discuss this, as more and more females receive the award. I am honoured to be a recipient in the same year as Maryam. It has been a pleasure to know her – we overlapped for a year early in our careers at Harvard, and later at Princeton. Her work is absolutely fantastic. I hope the media will not speak of her only as a top-rate female mathematician, but also as a top-rate mathematician who is doing truly groundbreaking work. Interview by Dana Mackenzie
16 August 2014 | NewScientist | 25
courtesy of manjul BhaRgava
well what is happening but “enter into unwritten agreements about what can be publicly remembered and acknowledged”. Our response to climate change is uncannily similar to an even more universal disavowal: unwillingness to face our own mortality, says neuroscientist Janis Dickinson of Cornell University in New York. She argues that overt images of death and decay along with the deeper implications of societal decline and collapse are powerful triggers for denial of mortality. There is a great deal of research showing that people respond to reminders of death with aggressive assertion of their own group identity. Dickinson argues that political polarisation and angry denial found around climate change is consistent with this “terror management theory”. Again, there is a complex relationship between our psychology and the narratives that we construct to make sense of climate change. For all of these reasons, it is a mistake to assume that the scientific evidence of climate change will flow directly into action – or, conversely, that climate denial can be dismissed as mere misinformation. The systems that govern our attitudes are just as complex as those that govern energy and carbon, and just as subject to feedbacks that exaggerate small differences between people. The problem itself is far from perfect and the situation is not hopeless, but dealing with it will require a more sophisticated analysis of human cognition and the role of socially shared values in building conviction. n
Hear no climate evil We’ll never tackle climate change unless we take into account how humans assimilate unwelcome information, says George Marshall DANIEL KAHNEMAN is not hopeful. “I am very sorry,” he told me, “but I am deeply pessimistic. I really see no path to success on climate change.” Kahneman won the 2002 Nobel prize in economics for his research on the psychological biases that distort rational decision- making. One of these is “loss aversion”, which means that people are far more sensitive to losses than gains. He regards climate change as a perfect trigger: a distant problem that requires sacrifices now to avoid uncertain losses far in the future. This combination is exceptionally hard for us to accept, he told me. Kahneman’s views are widely shared by cognitive psychologists. As Daniel Gilbert of Harvard University says: “A psychologist could barely dream up a better scenario for paralysis.” People from other disciplines also seem to view climate change as a “perfect” problem. Nicholas Stern, author of the influential Stern Review on the economics of climate change, describes it as the “perfect market failure”. Philosopher Stephen Gardiner of the University of Washington in Seattle says it is a “perfect moral storm”. Everyone, it seems, shapes climate change in their own image. Which points to the real problem: climate change is exceptionally amorphous. It provides us with no defining qualities that would give it a clear identity: no deadlines, no geographic location, no single cause or solution and, critically, no obvious enemy. Our brains 24 | NewScientist | 16 August 2014
scan it for the usual cues that predictions set two generations we use to process and evaluate in the future and endless talk of information about the world, but uncertainty. The latest report find none. And so we impose our from the Intergovernmental own. This is a perilous situation, Panel on Climate Change uses leaving climate change wide open the word “uncertain” more than to another of Kahneman’s biases – once per page. an “assimilation bias” that bends Discussions about economics, information to fit people’s meanwhile, invariably turn existing values and prejudices. into self defeating cost-benefit So is climate change really analyses. Stern offers a choice innately challenging, or does it between spending 1 per cent of just seem so because of the stories annual income now, or risking we have shaped around it? For losing 20 per cent of it in 50 years’ example, the overwhelming time. This language is almost and possibly hopeless struggle portrayed by the media and many “Is it any surprise that policy-makers are tempted campaigners provokes feelings to postpone action and of powerlessness. Scientists reinforce distance with computer gamble on the future?”
identical to that Kahneman used two decades earlier in his experiments on loss aversion. Is it surprising that when a choice is framed like this, policy-makers are intuitively drawn towards postponing action and taking a gamble on the future? If cost and uncertainty really are universal psychological barriers, it is hard to explain why 15 per cent of people fully accept the threat and are willing to make personal sacrifices to avert it. Most of the people in this group are left wing or environmentalists and have managed to turn climate change into a narrative that fits with their existing criticisms of industry and growth. Conservatives may justify climate inaction on the grounds of cost and uncertainty but they, too, are able to accept both as long as they speak to their core values. As former US vice-president and climate sceptic Dick Cheney said: “If there is only a 1 per cent chance of terrorists getting weapons of mass destruction, we must act as if it is a certainty.” Strongly held values can explain the convictions of those at the ends of the political spectrum, but they do not adequately explain the apparent indifference of the large majority in between. If asked, most agree that climate change is a serious threat, but without prompting they do not volunteer it. This silence is similar to that found around human rights abuses, argued the late Stanley Cohen, a sociologist at the London School of Economics. He suggested that we know very
For more opinion articles, visit newscientist.com/opinion
George Marshall is the author of Don’t Even Think About It: Why our brains are wired to ignore climate change, which is published in August in the US, September in Australia and October in the UK (Bloomsbury). He is the founder of the Climate Outreach and Information Network in Oxford, UK
One minute interview
Insight from a Rubik’s cube Manjul Bhargava explains how a moment of visual inspiration led to him winning mathematics’ most prestigious prize coming out, three of them. I just sat down and wrote out the relations between them. It was a great day! Have any of your other discoveries had unusual origins? I do tend to think about things very visually, and the Rubik’s cube is a concrete example of that visual approach. But that one is probably the most unusual and unexpected origin of all. You have proved several theorems. Do you have a favourite? Mathematicians often say that choosing a favourite theorem is like choosing one’s favourite child. Although I don’t yet have any children, I understand the sentiment. I enjoyed working on all the theorems I have proved.
Profile Manjul Bhargava has just won a Fields medal for his work on number theory. Now 40, he was one of the youngest people to be made a full professor at Princeton University, aged 28. He has extended the work of classical mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss
Does the Fields medal mean more to you than any other award you have won? Any award is a milestone, which encourages one to go further. I don’t know that I think of any award as meaning more to me personally than any other. The mathematics that led to the medal was far more exciting to me than the medal itself. The award citation says that you were inspired to extend Gauss’s law of composition in an unusual way. Can you explain what that is, and what you did? Gauss’s law says that you can compose two quadratic forms, which you can think of as a square of numbers, to get a third square. I was in California in the summer of 1998, and I had a 2 x 2 x 2 mini Rubik’s cube in my dorm room. I was just visualising putting numbers on each of the corners, and I saw these binary quadratic forms
Are there any mathematicians, living or dead, that you have particularly looked up to? My mother [Mira Bhargava, a mathematician at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York] has been a source of inspiration to me from the very beginning. She was always there to answer my questions, to encourage and support me, and she taught me how much the human mind is capable of. This year a woman, Maryam Mirzakhani at Stanford University, has finally won one of the Fields medals, after 52 consecutive male winners. How do you view this achievement? This is long overdue! Hopefully in a few years we will not even need to discuss this, as more and more females receive the award. I am honoured to be a recipient in the same year as Maryam. It has been a pleasure to know her – we overlapped for a year early in our careers at Harvard, and later at Princeton. Her work is absolutely fantastic. I hope the media will not speak of her only as a top-rate female mathematician, but also as a top-rate mathematician who is doing truly groundbreaking work. Interview by Dana Mackenzie
16 August 2014 | NewScientist | 25
courtesy of manjul BhaRgava
well what is happening but “enter into unwritten agreements about what can be publicly remembered and acknowledged”. Our response to climate change is uncannily similar to an even more universal disavowal: unwillingness to face our own mortality, says neuroscientist Janis Dickinson of Cornell University in New York. She argues that overt images of death and decay along with the deeper implications of societal decline and collapse are powerful triggers for denial of mortality. There is a great deal of research showing that people respond to reminders of death with aggressive assertion of their own group identity. Dickinson argues that political polarisation and angry denial found around climate change is consistent with this “terror management theory”. Again, there is a complex relationship between our psychology and the narratives that we construct to make sense of climate change. For all of these reasons, it is a mistake to assume that the scientific evidence of climate change will flow directly into action – or, conversely, that climate denial can be dismissed as mere misinformation. The systems that govern our attitudes are just as complex as those that govern energy and carbon, and just as subject to feedbacks that exaggerate small differences between people. The problem itself is far from perfect and the situation is not hopeless, but dealing with it will require a more sophisticated analysis of human cognition and the role of socially shared values in building conviction. n