Beyond the Tipping Point: Understanding Perceptions of Abrupt Climate Change and Their Implications

This article explores the influence of personal values and ontological beliefs on people’s perceptions of possible abrupt changes in the Earth’s climate system and on their climate change mitigation preferences. The authors focus on four key areas of risk perception: concern about abrupt climate change as distinct to climate change in general, the likelihood of abrupt climate changes, fears of abrupt climate changes, and preferences in how to mitigate abrupt climate changes. Using cultural theory as an interpretative framework, a multimethodological approach was adopted in exploring these areas: 287 respondents at the University of East Anglia (UK) completed a three-part quantitative questionnaire, with 15 returning to participate in qualitative focus groups to discuss the issues raised in more depth. Supporting the predictions of cultural theory, egalitarians’ values and beliefs were consistently associated with heightened perceptions of the risks posed by abrupt climate change. Yet many believed abrupt climate change to be capricious, irrespective of their psychometrically attributed worldviews or ‘‘ways of life.’’ Mitigation preferences—across all ways of life—were consistent with the ‘‘hegemonic myth’’ dominating climate policy, with many advocating conventional regulatory or market-based approaches. Moreover, a strong fatalistic narrative emerged from within abrupt climate change discourses, with frequent referrals to helplessness, societal collapse, and catastrophe. 1. Abrupt climate change in science and society The idea that changes in the Earth’s climate system can be abrupt is not new. This way of thinking arguably emerged after 1963 when mathematician and meteorologist Edward Lorenz published his famous research paper ‘‘Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow’’ (Lorenz 1963). His publication provided a mathematical demonstration of how small changes in weather conditions could trigger abrupt meteorological consequences—a demonstration of nonlinear atmospheric behavior. When he plotted his findings in phase space they resembled the wings of a butterfly, an iconic visualization from which the powerful ‘‘butterfly effect’’ metaphor would later be derived. In 1966, three years after Lorenz’s insight into the nonlinearity of weather, the first real-world evidence of abrupt changes in the Earth’s climatic history were unearthed in Greenland (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration 2009). Analysis of the first ice cores to be drilled to bedrock challenged the long-held belief that changes in climate occurred gradually over thousands of years, showing past climates to have changed substantially over centennial or even decadal time scales (e.g., Dansgaard et al. 1969). However, it was not until 1987 that this historical evidence was formally connected to the possibility of future abrupt changes in climate. In his 1987 Nature commentary ‘‘Unpleasant Surprises in the Greenhouse?,’’ Wallace Broecker introduced the idea that future climate changes would largely come as sudden surprises, comparing anthropogenic influences on climate to playing Russian roulette (Broecker 1987). The idea of abrupt climate change has since evolved to become as much, if not more, of a social phenomenon than it has a scientific one. Questions about abrupt Corresponding author address: R. Bellamy, School of Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia, Norwich NR4 7TJ, United Kingdom. E-mail: [email protected] 48 W E A T H E R , C L I M A T E , A N D S O C I E T Y VOLUME 3 DOI: 10.1175/2011WCAS1081.1 2011 American Meteorological Society climate change are motivated not only by scientific curiosity, but by social, political, ethical, and cultural concerns about their potential impacts and how to mitigate them. The possibility of abrupt climate change therefore presents a new challenge for decision-making, forcing humanity to explore their ontological beliefs about the benign stability of the planet and their personal values—or ‘‘ways of life’’—in a setting simultaneously characterized by great uncertainty and potential danger. Surprisingly, however, very little is known about how the risks of abrupt climate change—as distinct to the risks of climate change in general—are perceived (Lowe et al. 2006). In this article, we explore the influence of individual values and beliefs on perceptions of abrupt climate change, and on their preferences for the mitigation of such changes. Recognizing the dominant role of values and beliefs in the social construction of risks, cultural theory (Douglas 1970; Thompson et al. 1990) has yielded valuable insights into perceptions of climate change in general (e.g., Leiserowitz 2005, 2006). Accordingly, exploring the value of cultural theory for understanding perceptions of abrupt climate change is not without promise, and it has therefore been used and evaluated in this study. In doing so, we focus on four key areas of risk perception: concern about abrupt climate change as distinct to climate change in general; the likelihood of abrupt climate changes; fears of abrupt climate changes; and preferences in how to mitigate abrupt climate changes. 2. Understanding and communicating abrupt climate change a. The nature of nonlinearity To understand the scientific basis of abrupt climate change we must return to the architect of the butterfly effect: Edward Lorenz. Upon publishing ‘‘Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow,’’ he inadvertently became one of the early pioneers of what is today known as ‘‘Complexity Theory;’’ a theory rooted in understanding nonlinear ‘‘complex dynamical systems’’ such as the Earth’s climate (Lewin 1999). Popularized in public discourse as ‘‘Chaos Theory’’ by James Gleick in 1988, Complexity Theory describes such systems as complex ‘‘emergent global structures,’’ which arise from numerous simple interactions between the systems component parts. Complex systems will often display ‘‘attractors,’’ which are particular stable states to which they are drawn. If these systems are perturbed sufficiently, they may be knocked into alternate ‘‘stable states.’’ Described by mathematicians as ‘‘strange attractors,’’ these alternate states display internal dynamics that are qualitatively different from those of the previous state (Gleick 1988). The critical threshold at which a system will inescapably fall into one of these strange attractors is called the bifurcation point, or, as it is now often popularly referred to in climate change discourses, the ‘‘tipping point’’ (see Russill and Nyssa 2009). The nonlinearity of the Earth’s climate system suggests not only that changes may be abrupt, but also that there are significant challenges in prognosticating future system behavior (e.g., Clark et al. 2002). Uncertainty continues to amass when we consider the nonlinear nature of the potentially impacted entities, such as human society and nonhuman ecologies. For the few who have engaged with the issue, this uncertainty built upon uncertainty has inevitably resulted in broad and largely speculative impact predictions, as argued by Hulme (2003). b. A climate of fear The different ways in which the uncertain science and speculative impacts of abrupt climate changes are interpreted inevitably extends to the ways in which they and the risks they pose are communicated across societies. Such uncertainty is frequently deployed in climate change debates, as an argument both for and against the implementation of earlier and more robust mitigation and adaptation strategies (e.g., compare Nordhaus 2007 with Spash 2007). Advocates of earlier action argue that these changes present an imminent and dangerous threat to humanity, while opponents argue the unknowns are too great to justify allocating resources. Uncertainty also presents opportunities for abrupt climate change to be framed using different linguistic repertoires to engage with different audiences and service different purposes and agendas (Segnit and Ereaut 2007; Nisbet 2009). In abrupt climate change discourses, one of the most popular repertoires is that of ‘‘alarmism,’’ which is often used in conjunction with the catastrophe frame. With the aim of engaging people’s anxiety about the future, the system of language used within this repertoire is dominated by apocalyptic rhetoric, comprising words such as the increasingly popular ‘‘catastrophic.’’ Apocalyptic rhetoric is now frequently used in conjunction with the tipping point metaphor thereby revealing subjective and value-laden perceptions of risk. The media, politicians, and scientists can all adopt this stance, having used the metaphor in conjunction with ‘‘catastrophic’’ (former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, in Laitner and Parker 2006); ‘‘points of no return’’ (Connor 2009); ‘‘inescapable apocalypse’’ (Phillips 2009) and ‘‘precipice. . . beyond which there is no redemption’’ (Hansen 2005). Some have argued that constructing this apocalyptic vision of the future gives rise to an implicit sense of helplessness and fatalism (Hulme 2009a; Skrimshire 2011). On the other hand, others argue that the use of JANUARY 2011 B E L L A M Y A N D H U L M E 49