"Every American, whether they know it or not, has been affected by climate change," Edward Maibach, the director of George Mason University's Center for Climate Change Communication, told weather.com.
One of the most prominent ways it is already impacting the U.S. is through health. But most Americans have no concept of the complex intersection between their health and the environment, a report, "Public Perceptions of the Health Consequences of Global Warming," published in October 2014, indicated.
The report was compiled based on surveys from Dr. Maibach and his team, along with the Yale Project for Climate Change Communication. The organizations have been periodically surveying Americans on their beliefs surrounding climate change since 2008.
In the report, 6 in 10 people said they'd given climate change and their health little or no thought.
The majority of people surveyed either skipped the question asking which health problems are related to climate, or said they didn't know. One in four (27 percent) named at least one health problem related to global warming, and 10 percent answered — wrongly — that there are no health problems associated with it at all, the report stated.
But the climatic effects on health are varied and far-reaching. There's pollution-associated lung conditions, and illnesses, injuries and deaths stemming from extreme weather. Plus, climate change is already raising rates of vector-borne disease infections around the world. (Take chikungunya, a mosquito-carried disease that until 2014, didn't even exist in the United States.)
In the U.S., the spring pollen season is already occurring earlier due to climate change, according to the EPA. Heavy rainfall or flooding can spread water-borne diseases. Droughts can damage crop production, and in turn, the food supply. This list goes on.
Along the same vein, just 1 in 4 Americans feel they have personally experienced an effect of climate change. Interestingly, though perhaps not surprisingly, when severe weather hits a region, the individuals there then become more likely to consider climate change to be a greater threat.
"When people tell us they've personally experienced climate change, more often than not, what they're thinking about is a change in the weather in their part of the country," Dr. Maibach said. Beliefs in climate change are "almost always related to observations that they have made in their own little niche of the world."
Part of this comes from the idea that changing beliefs — and even more difficulty, behavior — is a tricky psychological challenge to our accepted worldview, Paul Stern, Ph.D., a psychologist who has researched human reactions to global changes, including climate change, for decades, told weather.com in 2013.
“When there’s a new issue to think about, in this case, climate change, people form their attitudes toward the new issue based on their underlying values,” he said.
Some people’s value systems prioritize the collective good. Others prioritize their individual lives, making action around a vague and distant threat that’s largely perceived as a merely academic debate psychologically unlikely. And some people don't act because they feel they can’t control the outcome, or the issue provokes too much anxiety, so they choose to look the other way — just temporarily, they believe, Dr. Stern said.
"The average American understands that climate change is happening. ... The average American also sees it as a distant threat in at least two different ways," Dr. Maibach said. "It's a threat that's distant to them in space, [as in] it's not happening here in my hometown. ... But even more importantly, they think of it as a problem that's distant in the future. [They think] it's not a real problem for another 50 or 100 years. As it turns out, neither of those are true."
Another problem is that many individuals and organizations believe that adjustments because of global warming will be more painful than not taking action at all. But Dr. Maibach and others firmly believe that is false.
"I'm absolutely convinced that the more quickly we can move toward clean energy, the more quickly all of us will live more healthfully — drink cleaner water and breathe cleaner air," he said.
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