Earlier this week, Juliet Eilperin at the WaPo discussed the results of a new study that the Climate Doom messaging crowd might want to pay attention to:
In the experiment involving undergraduates, the subjects read a news article that began with factual data provided by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change, but had two different endings. Half ended with warnings about the disastrous consequences of climate change, while half offered potential solutions to the problem, such as clean energy innovations. The results--which will be published in the January issue of the journal Psychological Science--showed that those who read the upbeat ending were more open to believing in the global warming's existence and were more confident about science's ability to solve the problem.
UPDATE:
Andrew Revkin at Dot Earth takes up the study, as well. He writes that it
reinforces the case that a large part of the climate challenge is not out in the world of eroding glaciers and limited energy choices, but inside the human mind.
