Perhaps the single biggest barrier to action on climate change is the fact that it doesn’t hit us in the gut. We can identify it as a great moral wrong, through a chain of evidence and reasoning, but we do not instinctively feel it as one. It does not trigger our primal moral intuitions or generate spontaneous outrage, anger, and passion. It’s got no emotional heat. (Ironic!)

I (and countless others) have tried to explain, address, and overcome this aspect of climate change many times, in many different ways. But the single best thing I’ve read on it is a new paper in Nature Climate Change called “Climate change and moral judgment,” by Ezra Markowitz and Azim Shariff, of the University of Oregon Psychology and Environmental Studies departments respectively. In it, they “review six reasons why climate change poses significant challenges to our moral judgment system and describe six strategies that communicators might use to confront these challenges.”

This is one of the most valuable things I’ve read on climate in ages, so it’s a damn shame it’s behind a pay wall. (I mean, it’s great, but I can’t in good conscience tell you to pay $32 for it.) To compensate for this unfortunate state of affairs, I’m going to quote from it liberally.

Here’s the basic thesis:

[C]limate change poses significant challenges to our perceptual, cognitive and affective information-processing systems, making it and its threats difficult to engage with and appreciate. For example, the non-linear nature of the climate system leads even highly educated individuals to incorrectly predict the trajectory of future atmospheric greenhouse-gas concentrations, and the abstract, probabilistic and intangible nature of climate change dampens emotional reactions to information about the issue. Moreover, when individuals do respond emotionally, their reactions are often defensive and counterproductive.

Read the rest from David Roberts at Grist HERE.

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