Climate change: what do we think, and what are we doing?

The UK needs to cut carbon emissions to net zero by 2050 if we’re going to meet our Paris Climate Agreement commitments. Can we do it? It will need a mixture of policy changes and individual actions, and a look at recent research can shed light on what we might do – and how likely those actions are.

Do we believe the problem is serious?

We know that increasing numbers of British people believe climate change is serious, because Ting Liu, Nick Shryane and Mark Elliot at Manchester have taken an overview of people’s attitudes over the last decade.

Earlier research in 2011 found that 28% of people were uncertain about the existence of climate change, although a more recent paper suggests that only 6% of survey respondents could be classed as deniers – and many of them are not overly confident in their beliefs. So, it seems that views are moving away from scepticism and towards acceptance – but this earlier work has tended to use cross-sectional data, which can’t show us change over time.

Liu, Shryane and Elliot, though, used Waves 4 and 10 of Understanding Society, covering 2012-14 and 2018-20 to look at two points in time, six years apart, when people said how much, on a scale of 1-5, they agreed with these statements:

Climate change is beyond control, it’s too late to do anything about it.
The effects of climate change are too far in the future to really worry me.
People in the UK will be affected by climate change in the next 30 years.
If things continue on their current course, we will soon experience a major environmental disaster.
The so-called ‘environmental crisis’ facing humanity has been greatly exaggerated.

This meant they could examine the same people near the beginning of a decade and near its end to see if and how their views had changed.

Clusters of belief

In both waves, it was possible to group respondents into three clusters: sceptical, concerned, and paradoxical. People in the sceptical cluster are the least likely to worry about the effect of climate change in the future, and to think it is exaggerated and far away. In the ‘concerned’ cluster, people agree that problems are coming, and that the crisis has not been exaggerated, and isn’t too far away to worry about.

The paradoxical cluster is more complicated. This group thinks the effects are too far in the future to worry about, but also believe that those effects will arrive within 30 years. This group is likely to feel that the risk has been exaggerated, but also that people will be affected in the near future – and that climate change is out of control, and it’s too late to tackle it.

The paradoxical cluster is the biggest, but also the least stable. People in the paradoxical and sceptical clusters tended to move towards the concerned cluster between the two waves of data, but the paradoxical cluster is still 40% of the population.

So, this news is partly encouraging, but still mixed. What else might affect our opinion of climate change?

What about weather?

One of the sayings many of us will have heard in recent years is “you’re confusing the weather and the climate” – often in response to people welcoming ‘global warming’ if it means hot summers, or expressing scepticism on the grounds of a cold winter. But what effect does weather have on people’s views – not only about climate change itself, but also about policies designed to mitigate it?

Three academics in Australia – David Johnston, Rachel Knott and Silvia Mendolia – have examined exactly this by linking Understanding Society data and temperature data from Met Office weather stations across the UK. This allowed them to compare the attitudes of people who lived in the same area, who answered their Understanding Society surveys in the same month, but who experienced a different number of abnormally hot days in the week before their interview. They also monitored whether there was more news coverage of climate change around the time of a heatwave, which would have given the issue a higher profile.

They found that support for public and private action to combat climate change actually fell after abnormally hot weather. Again, though, longitudinal data allow researchers to compare different time periods – and this negative effect of hot weather was only true at a time of high unemployment (2012-13), not when unemployment was low (2018-19).

Also, the support for policy to tackle climate change was lowest among people who were more financially insecure and who worked in carbon-intensive industries. “It is likely”, the researchers said, “that these people feel economically threatened by climate change mitigation policies and become more negative in their attitudes towards them when they are debated after unusual weather events.”

So: how can we increase understanding of climate change?

The effect of education

Going back to Liu, Shryane and Elliot and the clusters of opinion about climate change, they found that the strongest predictors of which cluster people were in were their education and political affiliation. The higher their qualifications, the more likely participants were to be ‘concerned’, and less likely to be in the other two clusters, in both waves. Those aligned with left-wing parties were at least 36.7% more likely in Wave 4 (and 58.7% in Wave 10) than right-wingers to be ‘concerned’.

Earlier research – the subject of an Understanding Society blog from Nick Powdthavee last year – showed that more years of schooling increase our understanding of climate change, but there was little evidence of that understanding leading to pro-environmental behaviours such as switching off lights, buying recycled toilet paper, or using public transport rather than travelling by car.

Behaviour change

However, that blog concluded that “‘nudge’ policies can prompt pro-environmental behaviour more than simply telling people to change – but they’re more successful if people identify themselves as someone who cares deeply about the environment. In other words, while education may not necessarily cause pro-environmental behaviours, nudge policies may have a much more significant and longer-lasting impact on the responses of better-educated people.”

And being a committed environmentalist really can change someone’s behaviour substantially – so much so, in fact, that it can change the course of their lives. Previous research has shown that being concerned about the environmental and pollution-related health is linked to a less positive attitude toward having children – but the existing research used cross-sectional data, and only asked people about whether they intend to have children in the future.

This year, for the first time, research has used longitudinal data to look at actual birth rates. Ben Lockwood, Nick Powdthavee and Andrew Oswald also used Waves 4 and 10 of Understanding Society, covering 2012-14 and 2018-20, in which people answered climate change questions. Using household data also allows them to see how many children (if any) people have. There was, indeed, a difference – “a 2.3 percentage point reduced probability of having given birth to a biological child [six years later] when compared to the representative person in the sample”.

They also compared two figures at either end of a hypothetical spectrum: “an extremely committed environmentalist” and “someone who is greatly unconcerned with behaving in an environmentally conscious way”. Holding a range of other influences constant, “a person entirely unconcerned about environmental behaviour is estimated here to be approximately 60% more likely to have a child when compared to a truly committed environmentalist”.

We know, then, that knowledge can change behaviour. Our next question surely has to be: what’s the best way of getting that information across?

What does protest achieve?

One way of bringing the climate to wider attention is to take direct action, and many of us have seen examples of this recently – not least two Just Stop Oil members throwing soup over Van Gogh’s Sunflowers. Many of us will have opinions on how effective or counter-productive we think this is – and will probably have heard the opinions of others, especially if we’re on social media – but what can the data tell us?

It’s too soon to know about the soup, but a paper by Yiannis Kountouris and Eleri Williams examined an earlier “campaign of mass civil disobedience”: Extinction Rebellion’s April 2019 occupation of five sites across central London, which famously involved blocking roads at Marble Arch and parking a pink boat in the middle of Oxford Circus.

Researchers can see when people answer our survey, so this paper was able to compare answers given before and after the 11-day protest (15-25 April 2019). The researchers found no evidence that the protest alienated the public from sustainable lifestyles. Indeed, there was some evidence that XR’s actions “influenced the public’s attitudes towards sustainable behaviour and their willingness to approve of climate change mitigation policy”.

However, they also found that responding to the survey after the protest was related to lower likelihood of being willing to pay a premium for environmentally friendly products. This might seem inconsistent, but it may be that the public were listening to XR’s “focus on the responsibility of national governments for environmental conservation and climate change mitigation”, and taking from it the message that government and business should bear the burden instead of, rather than alongside, individual actions.

In other words, just as legislation (indeed, any human action) can have unintended consequences, so can protest. Different people will take different messages from protests, not least because people have different awareness levels to begin with, and some groups in society face greater costs from pro-environmental behaviours and policies. The results tell us that protestors need to continually monitor how people respond to their actions, to make sure they’re effective.

Shaping messages

Given all of this, how can governments – and activists – shape messages in order to get the results they want?

We’ve seen that there is movement away from the ‘sceptical’ and ‘paradoxical’ clusters of opinion about climate change towards the ‘concerned’ group. However, paradoxical is still the largest group, so it makes sense to target them with environmental messages and policy. This group tends to be worried about climate change, but feel powerless to cope with it, and motivational messages targeted at them could shift their views.

The researchers think pessimistic messages might work better than optimistic ones with this group, but that the sceptical group may need to see risks quantified and visualised. Messages need to be carefully pitched, though. People need to hear that the threat is serious, but too much emphasis on worst-case scenarios could reduce people’s intention to act.

Ultimately, governments need to

present messages in a way which will influence behaviour
tailor messages to specific segments of society
target the news and other media that those groups use.

Testing specific policies

Research with data can also test specific policies to see if they work. We know from a paper in 2016, for example, that charging people for the plastic bags that shops used to give out free was successful. In Wales, where the charge first came in, there was a 25% increase in people reporting that they always took their own bag shopping – although there were few signs of ‘spillover’. That is, people didn’t start using public transport more, or putting on a jumper instead of turning up the heating. It may be that external pressure to change behaviour reduces people’s internal motivation to change other behaviours.

Another question which has come up concerns the potential unfairness of such policies. Air travel is a major source of carbon emissions, so it makes sense to direct policies at this sector. But does that mean that migrants – who may need to fly back to their country of origin to visit family and friends – are disproportionately affected? Or would air taxes disproportionately affect those on low and middle incomes, who may only be taking one foreign holiday a year, and not affect those who can afford to take multiple flights?

In fact, research using data from Understanding Society and the Living Costs and Food Survey shows that “the most progressive option is a ‘frequent air miles tax’ based on both the number of flights and emissions”. Recent migrants are likely to fly, but overall, taxing air travel is “far less regressive than taxing home energy or motor fuels”.

Taking action

Ultimately, if we are to tackle any problem, we must first understand it. The issue is an urgent one, but to deal with it effectively, we need to know