ED23F-06
Measuring Engagement with the Potential Consequences of Climate Change
Tuesday, 15 December 2015: 15:10
102 (Moscone South)
Neil Young, Univ of California Irvine, Irvine, CA, United States, Robert W Danielson, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, United States and Doug Lombardi, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA, United States
Abstract:
Across three studies, we investigated engagement with the consequences of climate change. We drew from the conceptual change and risk analysis literatures to find the factors that determine how much people will care about future risks. Questions derived from these factors were then asked about many hypothesized consequences of climate change. These consequences were drawn from an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change special report (IPCC, 2012) and, in the third study, additionally from the IPCC AR5 (IPCC, 2014). The first two studies, using undergraduate students, demonstrated that some consequences were indeed considerably more engaging than others. The third study used a more representative sample of American adults, drawn from Amazon Mechanical Turk and used the Global Warming's Six Americas Screening Tool (Maibach, Leiserowitz, Roser-Renouf, Mertz, & Akerlof, 2011) in a large screening survey to find 20 participants in each of the six audiences defined by this tool. These participants were then asked about the potential consequences of climate change. Results again showed that some consequences are considered more engaging than others, and also showed the ways in which members of these six audiences perceive the consequences of climate change differently.
