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The emerging politics of climate change.

Article Excerpt
One of the enduring puzzles of the political response to climate change is the polite behaviour of those who are most aware of the impending problems. For many years activists have undertaken well-behaved demonstrations and respectable lobbying but little beyond this range of polite political action.

Up to a point this has succeeded. Such actions have achieved a level of understanding regarding climate change. But the remarkable speed of change in public consciousness has been matched only by the speed of climate change itself and the escalation of the threat it poses. The latest reports suggest that the changes are happening faster than predicted. Ice caps are melting at an unprecedented speed. Species are being lost more frequently and fresh water supplies are declining in areas where they were once abundant.

As a society we are sleep-walking to disaster. The paradox was well expressed in a recent article in, of all places, the London Times. Columnist Camilla Cavendish reported mentioning to fellow journalists her plan to write another column on the latest alarming predictions that climate change was speeding up. The response from her colleagues was a collective groan. One summed it up by saying: 'If it was really bad, they'd do something'. The human tendency to convince yourself that everything is OK because no one else seems worried is deeply ingrained, Cavendish claimed. She cited a famous study of 'bystander apathy': two psychologists placed students in a room and asked them to fill out questionnaires. As they did so smoke began to trail up from a vent. The room soon filled with smoke. While some of the students left the room, few of them reported the 'fire', and most stayed put and continued to fill out the questionnaire. In another experiment the psychologists placed actors in the room who continued to write as the

room filled with smoke. The inactivity of a larger unconcerned group reassured the naive subjects. The likelihood of the subjects reporting the fire decreased as the number of bystanders increased. Cavendish concluded: 'Our tendency to shrug off responsibility seems to...

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