Why People Don't Get Global Warming: MIT Study

If scientists tend to agree that global warming is such a serious threat, why don't more people get it?

Professors at the Sloan School of Business at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology may have some insights.
John Sterman, a Sloan management professor, says that individuals have trouble understanding that even reducing the level of carbon dioxide emissions may not be enough to avoid catastrophe.

He uses a bathtub example noting that somehow people have a hard time understanding it. Let's say you have a bathtub with the drain plug out. If you have water pouring into a bathtub at twice the rate that water is draining away, sooner or later, the bathtub will overflow. Substitute carbon dioxide emission for water and you should get the idea.

But maybe not. Sherman and Linda Booth Sweeney of both the Harvard Graduate School of Education and MIT Sloan conducted tests among graduate student guinea pigs to see if they had the mental modeling ability to understand something like the bathtub idea.

They were asked to draw charts plotting the rates at which carbon dioxide is removed naturally in the environment and the rates of extra carbon dioxide caused by pollution. Although 60 percent of of the students were bright types with science or engineering backgrounds, most got the graph quiz wrong.

According to MIT, the professors found that "people generally don't have good mental models for understanding systems that involve inflows, outflows and accumulation..."

My takeaway: Perhaps that explains why the outcry over global warming hasn't been stronger. By now, a lot of the scientific nay-saying has been squashed. Both Barack Obama and John McCain say that some kind of cap and trade system is needed to cut carbon dioxide emissions. But one wonders why there isn't more concern.

(Image by focalplane via Flickr, CC2.0)