{"id":19712,"date":"2025-07-24T06:56:08","date_gmt":"2025-07-24T06:56:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/19712\/"},"modified":"2025-07-24T06:56:08","modified_gmt":"2025-07-24T06:56:08","slug":"boiling-frog-effect-makes-people-oblivious-to-threat-of-climate-crisis-shows-study-environment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/19712\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Boiling frog\u2019 effect makes people oblivious to threat of climate crisis, shows study | Environment"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"dcr-16w5gq9\">Surveys show that the increasing number of extreme climate events, including floods, wildfires and hurricanes, has not raised <a href=\"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/journals\/british-journal-of-political-science\/article\/do-extreme-weather-events-increase-public-concern-knowledge-and-attention-to-climate-change-in-china\/7169713B5848AE18BEB8892BC6C4A4BC\" data-link-name=\"in body link\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">awareness of the threats<\/a> posed by climate change. Instead, people change their idea of what they see as normal. This so-called <a href=\"https:\/\/aftercoal.pl\/en\/the-frog-boiling-syndrome-are-we-getting-accustomed-to-climate-change\/\" data-link-name=\"in body link\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">\u201cboiling frog effect<\/a>\u201d makes gradual change difficult to spot.<\/p>\n<p class=\"dcr-16w5gq9\">Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania wondered if climate change could be made more obvious by presenting it <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41562-025-02183-9\" data-link-name=\"in body link\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">in binary terms<\/a>. Local newspaper archives describing ice skating on Lake Carnegie when it froze in winter inspired a simple experiment.<\/p>\n<p class=\"dcr-16w5gq9\">Some test subjects were shown temperature graphs of a fictional town\u2019s winter conditions; others had a chart showing whether or not a fictional lake froze each year. The result, published in Nature, <a href=\"https:\/\/grist.org\/science\/break-through-climate-apathy-data-visualization-lake-freezing-study\/\" data-link-name=\"in body link\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">showed those who<\/a> receiving the second graphic consistently saw climate change as more real and imminent.<\/p>\n<p class=\"dcr-16w5gq9\">Binary data gives a clearer impression of the \u201cbefore\u201d and \u201cafter\u201d. The disappearing ice is more vivid and dramatic than a temperature trace, even though the underlying data is the same.<\/p>\n<p class=\"dcr-16w5gq9\">\u201cWe are literally showing them the same trend, just in different formats,\u201d says Rachit Dubey, a co-author of the study.<\/p>\n<p class=\"dcr-16w5gq9\">These results should help drive more effective ways of communicating the impact of climate change in future by finding simple binary, black-and-white examples of its effects.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Surveys show that the increasing number of extreme climate events, including floods, wildfires and hurricanes, has not raised&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":19713,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[1397,90,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-19712","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-environment","tag-science","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19712","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19712"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19712\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19713"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19712"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19712"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19712"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}