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Hi Kevin,

Speaking of public attitudes towards climate change, there is some really interesting behavior in this Fox News Poll

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,175070,00.html

I'm not surprised that people don't understand the large delays in the system (and I'm afraid "An Inconvenient Truth" didn't help).

The new IPCC SPM points out quite clearly that the global temperature will go on rising(*) at ~ 0.2 C per decade for a couple of decades for all the emission scenarios, irrespective of the differences between the scenarios. I don't recall if this came through in the general media accounts. It's something that needs to be stressed more.

(*) Assuming no major changes in other forcings.

"GHG emissions are now about twice the rate of GHG removal from the atmosphere."

Unbelievable. No, "GHG emissions" are not "about twice the rate of GHG removal." It's ***CO2 emissions***.

Methane emissions are actually completely balanced with methane removal. And CFC emissions are exceeded by CFC removal.

How can that incredibly basic error appear in the abstract of a journal that goes by the name, "Climate Change?" They're either very sloppy, or they're dishonest.

A misunderstanding of the physics is probably part of it. But I suspect that the psychology of discounting also plays a major role. We are heavily driven by evolutionary psychology to prefer a large hit some time in the distant future to a small hit in the here and now (e.g. see Soman et al 2004 http://www.mit.edu/people/shanefre/Marketing%20Letters.pdf ). The same psychology explains why, when left to their own devices, very few people save enough for their pension. Our brains have not evolved for these sorts of tasks.

"We report experiments with highly educated adults – graduate students at MIT – showing widespread misunderstanding of the fundamental stock and flow relationships, including mass balance principles, that lead to long response delays. "

People who go from box to box every day should be expected to misunderstand principles of natural systems, as we do not have sensory organs to perceive things on such scales and must rely on our brains.

Tom, I think that the risk-disacounting component you mention is undeniable, but there are other important factors as well, including pschological aspects of deniable that hinder our ability to change our minds.

Kevin, what the S/S abstract misses is that policymakers face very short time horizons and have little institutional incentives to face long-term threats, unless there are clear short-term benefits to be gained by addressing them.

Another important aspect is that there are certain corporate special interests with long-term horizons that have been maximizing their interests by postponing action on climate change. These groups have an interest in fostering the confusion and lack of understanding that S/S document, and continue to exert themselves to mischaracterize the views of those in favor of action and to portray the problem as one that is best dealt with by delay and further study. Yesterday's WSJ editorial is a case in point:

"We don't deny that carbon emissions may play a role, but we don't believe that the case is sufficiently proven to justify a revolution in global energy use. The economic dislocations of such an abrupt policy change could be far more severe than warming itself, especially if it reduces the growth and innovation that would help the world cope with, say, rising sea levels. There are also other problems--AIDS, malaria and clean drinking water, for example--whose claims on scarce resources are at least as urgent as climate change.

The IPCC report should be understood as one more contribution to the warming debate, not some definitive last word that justifies radical policy change. It can be hard to keep one's head when everyone else is predicting the Apocalypse, but that's all the more reason to keep cool and focus on the actual science."

http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110009625