Wake up and smell the smoke of disaster

November 8, 2007

Wake up and smell the smoke of disaster

Camilla Cavendish; Why are we so cool about climate change?

A collective groan in the office when I mutter that I might write about the UN's “state of the planet” report. What a turn-off: gloomy stats about mankind changing the weather, and destroying species and forests.

Environmentalists may get off on climate porn, but most people just turn away. “If it was really so bad, they'd do something,” says one colleague, without specifying who “they” are. The human tendency to convince yourself that everything is OK, because no one else is worried, is deeply ingrained.

Psychologists studied this phenomenon after the 1964 murder of Kitty Genovese. She was repeatedly attacked, outside her New York flat, by a stranger over the space of half an hour. Witness to that event were 38 people who stood at their windows but did not even dial for help. They just peered into the dark, listening to her screams, until she died.

John Darley and Bibb Latané later ran a series of experiments that confirmed that the more people who witness an event the less responsible any one of them feels. We assume that someone else is better qualified to respond. We are afraid to be the only one to make a fuss. “Social etiquette” trumps common sense.

Our tendency to shrug off responsibility seems to hold true even when we ourselves are in danger. Darley and Latané asked a series of college students to sit in a room and fill out a questionnaire. When smoke started to pour into the room through a vent, the others, all actors, ignored it and went on writing calmly. Ninety per cent of subjects copied the actors, even when the smoke became so thick that they could barely see and were coughing. But subjects who were alone in the room, under the same conditions, almost all reported the smoke as an emergency. That is an astonishing finding - that the inaction of other people can make us underestimate threats to our own safety.

In the past few weeks we have been told, by reputable sources, that the oceans are warming faster than anyone predicted. That species are becoming extinct a hundred times faster than fossils record. That fresh water supplies, critical to food production, are under strain. That we are approaching tipping points that may make climate change irreversible. This stuff makes me feel pretty desperate. I would think that other people would worry too. But then I go to the office, and to friends' houses, and no one mentions it. Nor do the politicians.

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