Do doomsday scenarios discourage people from acting on climate change?

Despite the overwhelming consensus among scientists that anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change is real, the public has remained relatively unmoved. According to a 2010 Gallup poll, 48 percent of Americans said they believed that the seriousness of global warming is "generally exaggerated," a 17-percent increase since 1997 [source: Newport]. And at least one study has concluded that trend can be partly explained by what they call alarmism [sources: Ereaut and Segnit].

That 2006 study, conducted by the British think tank Institute for Public Policy Research, was based on a review of more than 600 news articles and advertising clips published in the U.K. The authors found that they could broadly classify the tone of these articles within three general categories: alarmism, non-pragmatic optimism and pragmatic optimism. The first, alarmism, the authors concluded, is the most damaging method of disseminating information on climate change -- and it was also the most common device used in the articles the authors surveyed.

The authors found that alarmist language used in these articles, terms like "civilizational collapse," "point of no return," "global chaos" and "tipping point" suddenly accelerate the severity of the issue for the reader, which may lead to a sense of helplessness. By creating this sense of enormity, the authors concluded, alarmism also creates a sense of distance from the problem.

The authors didn't prove direct causation between alarmist reporting and a lack of response by the general public toward taking large measures against climate change. Yet, researchers in other fields have come to similar conclusions -- that messages to the public can be counterproductive when crafted badly.

A 2010 study from Northwestern University, for example, found that a Canadian public service announcement campaign that targeted binge drinking had the opposite of its intended effect. The study found that when already experiencing a sense of guilt and shame, students exposed to the PSAs that used tactics like guilt or shame were more likely to binge drink within two weeks of viewing them [source: Popovich]. Similarly, another study published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology in 2009 found that warnings on cigarette packs that explicitly link smoking to death and disease with messages like, "Smoking can kill you" increase smoking among some people [source: Jacobs].

That 2009 study was conducted through the lens of Terror Management Theory, which may provide an answer to why alarmist messages of climate change could be counterproductive.

In the 2009 study of health warnings on cigarette packages, the people who were more likely to report wanting to smoke after being shown death-related messages about smoking were the ones who tied their self-esteem to their smoking habits. In a prior exercise, the participants had filled out a questionnaire that correlated their self-esteem to smoking.

These findings support the field of psychology called Terror Management Theory (TMT). This field, created in the 1980s by psychologists at the University of Missouri, is based on the work of anthropologist Ernest Becker, author of the seminal work "Denial of Death." Becker concluded that because humans are aware of the impending demise of all living things, including ourselves, we construct culture and its trappings to distract us from becoming obsessed with our inevitable death. In Becker's view, everything from politics to televised sports to celebrity to war is created by humans in an unconscious effort to create meaning in life.

Terror Management Theory transfers Becker's anthropological ideas into the field of psychology and standardizes them. Under TMT, humans cling to the cultures they identify with most to stave off their preoccupation with death. When faced with the reminder of one's demise, a person combats the attendant terror by clinging more strongly to that culture or group that constitutes the person's identity, a process called distal defense [sources: Cox and Ardnt, Greenberg, et al]. In other cases, a proximal defense is triggered, and a person will downplay the seriousness of any threat to his or her mortality [source: Greenberg, et al]. This may be the mechanism at work with climate change messages.

The reminders of mortality associated with alarmist climate change messages can trigger proximal defenses. When these defenses are triggered, even those who agree that climate change is real would move to diminish the potential danger of climate change; those who disagree would likely disagree even more strongly [source: Dickinson].

If Terror Management Theory explains how counterproductive alarmism can be when it comes to climate change, then the media should avoid the threat of death, chaos and destruction in favor of a more pragmatic approach. Unfortunately, we see reminders of our impending death in the media every day, provoking alarmist responses. Almost as soon as the pragmatic approach adopted the compact fluorescent light bulb (CFL) as the symbol of how every individual can make a real, collective contribution toward fighting climate change, news reports emerged warning of the physical dangers posed by the mercury found in CFLs.