Little Ice Age Is Coming

http://www.desmogblog.com/warming-and-winter-storming
Warming and Winter Storming
29 December 10
It’s a typical blog comment for this time of year. “I hope,” wrote one of my 'skeptic' readers, “the folks in the NE USA and Europe didn’t hurt their backs when shoveling all that global warming.”

This common insinuation--that somehow, human-caused climate change is refuted by the perennial occurrence of bad winter weather--puts us scientific rationalists in a bind.

To truly understand why climate denial is strengthened in winter, we need to dig deeper into the psychological factors that seem to be at play here. So here’s a stab—based on my reading the new booklet, The Psychology of Climate Change Communication, http://cred.columbia.edu/guide/ from the folks at the Center for Research on Environmental Decisions (CRED) at Columbia University.

According to CRED, we all use “mental models” as a kind of shorthand to help us apply what we think we know about the world to new situations. The models steer us towards useful answers quickly and without requiring much work--using past assumptions to guide future decisions and letting us rapidly determine what’s going on and what we think.

To that end, mental models also help us filter information and determine what to pay attention to. This can lead “confirmation bias,” in which we only pay attention to information that seems to confirm what we believe anyway and ignore or discount contradictory information.

Well. One powerful mental model out there when it comes to weather is the notion that it’s nothing but change, change, change. Weather is quirky, capricious, variable. It strands you at airports. It rains out soccer games.

If this model is dominant in your head, and you don't know much climate science and aren't spending time focusing on it, you'll be inclined to discount global warming regardless of politics. Because global warming, after all, suggests there’s a pattern behind all the craziness--a pattern that’s extremely hard for the average person to discern and that does not adhere to the mental model.