How often does the lake freeze?: Thus, people better understand climatic communities

Berlin pelvis | The idea with the lake came to the university in its first semester. She studied at Princeton University, where students ride skates on the nearby Lake Carnegie for decades. But this was hardly possible in 2020. “I was curious why the lake was no longer closed,” Liu says.

She left old newspaper articles and interviewed former students to document and show a decrease in ice: it was a climate change. When she published her results in the journal of graduates, she wrote countless graduates, reported her memoirs and mourned the experience that is hiding from the current students.

“Many combine a sense of loss with the fact that the lake no longer freezes,” Liu says. “There is also a little nostalgia.”

Even then, Liu was surprised by an emotional reaction, she recalls. Now, being a doctoral student at the University of Carnegie -Mellon, she checked her intuition in the study and found out: how to statistically represent the effects of climate change, matters. She wrote a study with two colleagues and in a magazine of a specialist Nature is human behavior Published.

Central result: People perceive the climatic consequences as stronger, if the data are binary, that is, as clearly distinguishable, or anyone: in the past the lake is frozen, now it is hardly. It used to be white Christmas, today they are less common. In the past, summer festivals rarely had to be canceled from the forest fire, now more often.

On the other hand, data points, such as an increase in temperature, which researchers call the “continuous presentation”, gradually change.

To find out that Liu and her colleagues divided 799 participants in the study into groups and showed them either a diagram with binary or continuous climate data. The data was compiled and mentioned on the equally designed lake.

Then, subjects must evaluate on a scale from 1 to 10, what effect the climate change has on the lake. Who looked at the temperature (See the correct schedule)On average 6.6. Anyone who saw a diagram that entered only whether the lake was frozen or not (See Left -wing Graphic)They appreciated the climatic consequences to be much more cruel: 7.5.

Researchers found the same effect when they repeated the experiment with real lakes. Even when he provided temperature data with the trend line, so the increase became even more noticeable, the binary representation remained more effective.

Liu and her colleagues suspected that the binary performance created what they call the “illusion of sudden changes”: the lake is continuously heated, but it is easier to read from binary data, that this is a new norm and that this is new, as a rule, worse than the old.

Researchers also checked this. Anyone who saw a binary representation found more a point in the data than the temperature at which the temperatures were shown, even if the data did not have such an inclination point, because the lakes continue to collapse, although much less often.

Respondents react more to the direct consequences of climate change, such as the lack of ice cream than a rather abstract increase in temperature, is suspected by Liu and her colleagues. In addition, thanks to the binary presentation and illusion of sudden changes, the study participants can rather understand that many consequences of climate change are irreversible.

“What we learned is not quite surprising,” Liu says. “But it’s good that now it is scientifically proven.” At the same time, she warns, this is not enough to give a climate change. Piano gas emissions do not decrease from simple knowledge. “We did not turn to how to translate it into real actions.”