I was intrigued by the discussion of psychology and climate change. In particular, it never occurred to me to think of the challenge it is to make climate change relevant to the public in the same way a, for example, medical diagnosis is. As mentioned in the video, a reason why this is the case is because climate comes across as something foreign and thus unworthy of vast attention. The following quote from Gina McCarthy caught my attention: "People don't accept problems there is not solution to" (9:12). I now understand how this idea applied to the time when scientists first learned climate change was a threat and therefore needed to be communicated but there was not a set of solutions, which led to denial by some folks that has been exacerbated to this date despite the advancement in models and proposals to address the problem. McCarthy's insights made me more aware of why it is important to communicate climate change as a threat to not only the environment but to public health, in addition to making the science more digestible by getting rid of the gobbledygook.
Watch Gina McCarthy's interview here.
Oswaldo, your comment caught my eye because Gina McCarthy's quote about people not accepting problems they don’t have solutions to really stood out to me as well. You also mention climate change denial persisting even in the face of advancing models, which makes me wonder: even if we somehow had a model for climate change with little to no uncertainty, would people take action? If model uncertainty isn't the only reason for climate change denial, what else is at play? This all makes me think about how some of the denial is not incidental or simply born of ignorance, but is actively being sown. In Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, Professor Naomi Oreskes of the Harvard history of science department writes about how a handful of contrarian scientists have worked to challenge the notion that there is consensus about the reality of climate change, even though there is. These "merchants of doubt," a powerful opponent even against increasingly advanced models, may play a part in people's unwillingness to accept climate change as a problem.