“Our results echo other recent poll data showing that Americans are growing more concerned about climate change,” write the authors of a recent 2008 Porter Novelli/George Mason University poll on the subject. This was a major effort: The authors surveyed 12,000 adults (most pollsters just survey 1,000) and 1,000 children (which most pollster don’t try to reach).

And in two other key areas, the results echo the findings of other studies in the Water Words collection:

#1: Global Warming Is An Issue of Relative Consensus

Analyzing the responses by gender, age, race, and other factors, the authors concluded “…on the whole, we found their demographic similarities to be more striking their differences.” This is the pattern for environmental issues generally, not just for global warming.

#2: You Must Warn AND Encourage

The report clearly validates one of the fundamental principles of the Water Words That Work method: It’s as important to convince people that their actions matter as it is to convince them that the problem is real.

The authors found that those who believe that global warming is real and dangerous, and also have confidence in their ability to make a difference participate in many conservation behaviors. However, those who believe global warming is real, but lack confidence in their ability to make a difference, participate in far fewer conservation behaviors. That’s common sense, but nature protection and pollution control experts routinely invest more effort in proving the problem rather than the solution. This report provides fresh insight into why that’s a mistake.

Here at Water Words That Work, we have an elaborate formula to convince people they can make a difference: You tell them: “You can make a difference, here’s how…”

Coming soon, I’ll blog about the findings in this research that don’t support my own deeply held beliefs!

The market research company Umbria recently released a study of the attitudes people express online about global warming. The good news: Public opinion is generally with us. The bad news: There is a substantial minority of vocal holdouts who will be all but impossible to convince. If you follow social research as closely as I do, that’s fresh confirmation of an old story.

A variety of studies have reached this conclusion and have generally put the naysayers into two camps — people who really have a grudge against nature protection and pollution control efforts, and people who just don’t want to be inconvenienced for the greater good. Umbria calls them “rejectors” and “negators,” and describes them thus:

A key thing to understand about “rejectors,” “negators,” and everybody else for that matter, is that they don’t just feel this way about global warming – they feel this way about everything. These are personality types, not rationally thought-through positions.

When you run into these personality types, and you will, it’s better not to get drawn into an argument with them. You won’t change their mind, so why waste your breath? Focus your energy instead on the much larger number of people who are willing to be persuaded but have some inhibition they need you to overcome.

No, it’s not John Stewart funny fake news, it’s scary fake news – click the image above to see National Guardsmen handing out bottled water in a drought-stricken Southern California of the not-so-distant future.  It’s an ad for an upcoming National Geographic Special on global warming. Social research suggests the producers have chosen their message well. As the chart below reveals, setting this up as a looming crisis makes the whole thing more believable.

(Click the chart to download the full poll, note how the reference to future generations causes the sense of urgency to spike. That’s why it’s a word that works!) 

And by depicting the rationing and lines for water, the prodicers convey how droughts and global warming can affect them, without hosing viewers down with a lot of hard-to-parse scientific jargon. So I’m confident this fake news story will do a good job building interest in the upcoming TV special. But will the TV special move us in the direction of solutions? 

That will depend on the degree to which the producers have gotten over the antiquated notion that “awareness = action” and use their airtime to address the concerns that really hold viewers back. “I’m not sure what to do.” “I don’t think my efforts amount to anything.” “I can’t solve this problem by myself.” “I don’t see anybody else doing their part,” etc… etc… 

We can’t move people past objections like this with scare tactics. Fear is a poor remedy for ignorance and lack of confidence. We have to help them out by showing them role models doing things they can do, and demonstrating that others are doing their part. We have to encourage them that we’ll all be working together and it’s not too late to make a difference.  It’s as important to prove to people that they can save money by conserving water and energy as it is prove that global warming is real.  

Thanks to Aqua Blog Maven over at Aquafornia for the tip! Feels great to be back in the blogging saddle.

Help a good conservationist through a tough time. Click below to donate to one of my reader’s medical bill fund.

Here’s a nifty TV commercial and/or PSA (not sure which) about global warming. A few unfortunate words choices hold it back from achieving greatness.The black balloons make it come close. They provide a vivid and compelling illustration of how our various little energy uses add up. It’s terrific. “Save energy, and you’ll also save money,” the narrator intones. Nice. Like that. The closing tagline is: “You have the power to make a difference.” Right on.But it’s just a flat out mistake to use the term “climate change” in a piece like this when you could use “global warming” instead. It’s well established that everyday citizens respond to these terms quite differently. I know the chart below is hard to read — click to get to the full report — but it reports the results of polling around various terms, and basically finds that everday citizens report 25% more concern when asked about “global warming” than “climate change.” That’s a big difference!
Source: The Environmental Deficit: Survey on American Attitudes on the Environment, Global Strategy Group, 2004Finally, there’s not a single line in there about why you should care about either climate change OR global warming. Plenty of people out there in TV land need at least a little reminder of that for the rest of the PSA to make sense.

So here’s what I propose:

• First, replace the term “climate change” with “global warming” in every instance
• Second, replace the bland-sounding term “greenhouse gas” with the more attention-grabbing term “pollution that causes global warming”
• Finally, kick off the piece with a statement like “If we don’t stop global warming, future generations won’t be as safe as we are today.”

THEN the script will be as powerful as the visuals.

Thanks to Robert at watercrunch for forwarding me the tip!