We also discussed the current discourse in American politics and how attitudes differ among registered voters. I hope you enjoy our conversation. Anthony Lizawitz, welcome to Columbia Energy Exchange.

Thanks, Bill. It's great to be with

you. Anthony, you're a human geographer by training, and that was a subject of your PhD from the University of Oregon. For those who may not be familiar with the term, what is a human geographer and what attracted you to this field?

Well, really, I was a combination. So my true discipline is our PhD was in environmental science studies and policy. Geography itself is a very interdisciplinary discipline. It goes, of course, back hundreds of years and really looked at two main things, physical geography, so the spatial patterns and interaction of species and climate and oceans. And so on and the physical world. And then likewise, human geography looks at those same kinds of spatial patterns and interactions over time in the human world, like how do human beings move across the planet, how religions spread across the planet, how are different political geographies shaping our world today, like the rise of nationalism is just one example. So anyway, it was the perfect place because the discipline itself always had this really incredibly important and rich conversation around the intersection of the natural world and the human world. And so it was the perfect place to kind of ground my dissertation. And then I did a lot of interdisciplinary work predominantly in cognitive psychology to make my particular focus, which was on how the public in the United States is thinking and responding to climate change. So again, how do human beings respond to changes in the natural world?

Yeah, and I read where you grew up on a farm in Michigan and followed your undergraduate studies at Michigan State University, moved to Colorado to work as a ski bomb. And that's where you became interested in climate change. Is that true?

Yeah, a little more to that is I was actually as an undergrad, I was an international relations major. And I thought I had a, this was back during the Cold War and I thought I had a long career ahead of me, basically trying to keep the world from blowing itself up. So I studied a lot of Soviet nuclear policies and China policies and the US and so on. But six months before I graduated, the Berlin Wall came down and my international international relations degree turned into a history degree like that. So I know what that feels like. And so yeah, I followed a friend out to Colorado. I thought I was just going to make a little money, travel around the world. And instead I got incredibly lucky to become one of the first staff members at the Aspen Global Change Institute, where I spent four years working with many of the world's leading climate scientists, ozone scientists at the time, biodiversity specialists and so on. And it changed my life. It's why I do what I do today because I suddenly got introduced and this is back in 1990, just what we as human beings were doing to the world's climate. And even then we were very clear what was, what was ahead of us as human beings on this planet. Actually, it's now 33 years later and so many of those predictions unfortunately are coming true all around us. So anyway, it led me ultimately to come back to graduate school because ultimately the question I kept wrestling with was, okay, and the natural science is fascinating and it's so, I mean, it's really just a fascinating study to think about how this complex system of the climate works. But in the end, why do we have climate change? Why do we have ozone depletion? Why are we facing the sixth great extinction event? And I kept coming back as an answer to that is it's human beings. The reason we have all these problems is because of human perceptions, human choices, human decisions, human behavior. So I ultimately decided that, look, if I really want to address these issue, the course that I should be studying is not the natural sciences, but the social sciences and yes, the humanities because that's where the roots of this problem really lie and where the solutions are going to emerge. So anyway, long story short, that took me on to graduate school and ultimately to my position here at Yale where I direct the Yale program on climate change communication.

Well here we are and as you got off to a fabulous start in your career and it's turned out to be so timely and urgent in terms of the sorts of studies that you're involved in there at Yale. Just this summer, we saw extreme weather around the world, including record high temperatures as well as devastating fires, floods and other storms. Arguably Tony, it should make a fresh impression on people, but is that happening?

So this is something we've been studying for a long, long time. So let me just give the listeners a little more context. So at the Yale program on climate change communication, we study how do people around the world respond to this issue. So what do they understand and misunderstand about the causes, the consequences and solutions? How do they perceive the risks? So the likelihood and severity of different impacts from wildfires to human health to sea level rise and so on. What kinds of policies do they support or oppose? And then what kinds of behaviors are people engaged in or willing to change in order to address climate change in related issues? And then ultimately as scientists, our ultimate question is why? What are the underlying psychological, cultural, political reasons? Why some people get really engaged with this issue? Others are kind of apathetic and some are downright dismissive and hostile or at least they are in just the United States and a couple of the countries and we can get into that later. We also study this at many different levels. So we've been doing, for example, and I'll draw on this to answer your question, a project with our partners at George Mason University for the past 15 years that we call climate change in the American mind. We do two nationally representative surveys each year. So every spring, every fall, every spring, every fall, and I've been doing that now since 2008. We also do a lot of work at the state and local level. So we know what's going on, where the rubber hits the road, so to speak, across the country on these issues, but also a lot of work internationally. So first ever studies in China, India, Brazil, we just released a report on Indonesia, and then we've been partnered with both the Gallup World poll and metadata for good to do studies with data from about 192 countries and territories. So I think our conversation is going to end up covering a lot of different ground. So it's just to say that's all the kind of work we do. So back to your question, what role is weather and weather experience beginning to play? So that was a question we asked ourselves way back in 2008 when we got started is like, when does direct experience and even broader than that vicarious experience? Because it's not just that you have to experience a flood yourself, you can watch the news. You can talk to friends and family or other people that you know, or that you only know about because you've watched it on the television news and hear their stories. Hear the see the trauma that they've experienced, seeing how their home has been destroyed by a flood or a fire or et cetera, et cetera. All of those are pathways in today's world by which we can change our beliefs and our opinions and our feelings and our ultimately our concerns about the issue of climate. So the long story short of this is that for many, many years we saw no influence of the direct experience of extreme weather in the United States. In fact, the issue and I know we'll get into this more later was essentially so, if I may use the word polluted by the politics, that it was very difficult for any signal from direct experience to emerge out of that noise. But in 2016, we finally for the first time saw the influence of direct experience, namely that people who had experienced hot, dry weather, especially in kind of the Great Plains area, we began to see just that they were changing their views, even controlling for politics and ideology. And ever since then, we think that signal from the direct experience or vicarious experience of these extreme events has gotten louder and louder. And as you've just said, this past year has been truly brutal. I mean, we've seen a whole succession of just horrible years of major disasters, of course. But this past year at both the national level, the local level, and of course, the global level where global temperatures are just off the charts. I mean, just astoundingly record highs beyond anything that ever in recorded human history.

Yeah, and it just continues, by the way, right? I mean, we saw a record hot summer in June, July and August, and now September. The fourth consecutive month of unprecedented heat, it's putting the 2023 on a track to be the hottest year in recorded history. That's right.

And so long, short of that is that we are beginning to see Americans finally connecting the dots between what for most of them is this abstract issue, climate change, that they don't think about very much, they don't talk about it very much, and they're finally connecting the dots between climate change and these impacts that are either happening to themselves or people they know, or that they're seeing play out on their television screens or phone screens or whatever. So at least in the United States, we're beginning to see more and more people saying climate change is actually harming people in the United States today and that increasingly they're convinced that it's going to harm them. Now, we still have a long way to go in the United States. That all said, we also see at the global scale that this has come through much more clearly than it has in the US because it's not been so distracted and polluted by the politics. And so that's a really, really important point.

It is and I do want to discuss that. But just a data point there, that survey you were referring to of Americans, how they view the response to the impacts of extreme weather, the survey in the spring showed that Americans are worried, as you know, about extreme heat and understand it is affected by climate change. 72% of Americans are at least a little worried about extreme heat harming their communities. And you found, if I got this right, that extreme heat tops the list of worries about climate impacts. That's right.

And you got to put all that against the backdrop of what do Americans actually understand about climate change? And even there, things have been getting better in recent years. So we're basically at or near an all time high. So as of last April, and by the way, we're just about to go into the field. So we'll have our latest data in the next few weeks. But even in April, 74% of Americans said that climate change is happening. And that's near an all time high. So you know, congratulations, America. That's something to celebrate. What would it have been say five years ago, Tony? Oh, five years ago, we were probably around 70%, 69%. And if you go back to 2010, we were only at 57%. So it's been slowly increasing over the years. But to put that in context, yes, 74% near all time high in the United States. But if we were in Brazil or Japan, this number would be over 95%. Okay. So it's just to say that even though we're at some all time highs, we still have a substantial proportion of Americans who either don't think is happening. And by the way, I haven't even gotten to the human cause question. They just don't accept that it's happening at all, or they just don't know. So we still have some work to do in the United States.

Yeah, you refer to that study. You looked at your program at Yale and George Mason have done studies categorizing people in the US and other countries into six groups on the broader topic of climate change, alarmed, concerned, cautious, disengaged, doubtful and dismissive. And the quote unquote alarmed were the largest group in about three quarters of the countries and territories you surveyed as some 80 out of 100 of them. The greatest alarm was sounded in five countries, Chile, Mexico, Malawi, Bolivia and Sri Lanka. In the US, only about one third of the respondents were alarmed. Yeah.

And in fact, when we look specifically at this National Chief Representative data, it's a little smaller than that even. It's about 26% different methodologies, basically. But let me just quickly give people the understanding of what we mean. So one of the first rules of effective communication is know your audience. Who are they? What do they know? What do they think they know? Who do they trust? Where do they get their information? What are their underlying values? Okay. And it's only once you understand who they are that you as a communicator can go more than halfway to meet them where they are and help them take the next step in their learning journey. And I said that so simply, but it's so hard for most of us to do because we want to talk about whatever it is most present on our mind. So it would be great to have an hour long conversation right now about border adjustment taxes and what role they might play in solving climate change. That is not an appropriate conversation for 99.9999% of humanity. That is not where they are on this issue. So it's just to say that we all suffer from what we call the veil of knowledge, not the veil of ignorance, but the veil of knowledge that once we learn something, we just automatically assume that everyone else around us knows what we know, but they don't. And so again, that's why we developed this tool, this analysis that we call Global Warming Six Americas and that we've now extended around the world to try to better understand who these different audiences are. And like you said, here in the United States, the first is a group we call the Alarm that 26%. These are people who fully convinced is happening human cause urgent. They strongly support action. And the number one question in their mind is what can we do? What can I do as an individual? What can we do as communities, as cities, states, the country and yes, the world? And so we've done a really good job helping them understand the gravity of this problem, why it's so important. And they're absolutely eager to get involved, but we haven't done a good job helping them understand what they and we all can do. So it's just to say the communication need for them is really to is engagement is like, well, what can we do and where do we go?

And just to put in perspective, other countries that you found with relatively small percentages of Alarm were Germany, United Kingdom,

Saudi Arabia and Indonesia. And there are very different reasons for those and we'll get into those in a bit. So anyway, to continue on with the Six Americas, then we have a group we call the Concerned at 27%. They also think it's happening human cause in serious, but they still think of the impacts as distant, distant in time that we won't feel the impacts for a generation or more, or distant in space. This is about polar bears or developing countries, but not the United States, not my state, not my community, friends, family or me. And as a result, it becomes psychologically distant. So yes, they support action, but they don't yet understand why it's so urgent that we act now to reduce carbon pollution as quickly as possible. That a group we call the cautious, still in the fence. Is it real? Is it not? Is it natural? Is it serious? Is it overblown? They're paying attention, but they're just kind of confused by what they're hearing. Then a small, but I think important group that we call the disengaged, who basically at 7% and they basically say, you know, I don't think I've ever even heard that term global warming. I don't know what that is. I don't know what the causes consequences or solutions are. I never hear anyone talking about it. I just don't know. Then a group we call the doubtful at 11%. These are people who say, you know, I don't think it's real. But if it is, it's just natural cycles. Nothing we as humans have anything to do with, nothing we can do anything about, so they don't see it as much of a risk. And then last but not least, just the group we call the dismissive, also at 11%, who are firmly convinced it's not happening, not human cause, not a serious problem, and most of whom quite literally tell us that they're conspiracy theorists. They say it's a hoax. His scientist making up data. It's a UN plot to take away American sovereignty. Is it get rich scheme by Al Gore and his friends and many other such kind of conspiracy narratives? Now, the crucial thing to note about them is that they are only 11%. They're only 11%, but they're a really loud 11%. They're really vocal 11%. They've tended to dominate public discourse. In fact, they're very well represented in the House of in Congress. So what has happened is that they have so dominated public conversation about this that they have intimidated the other nine out of 10 Americans into what we call climate silence. Many people are actually afraid to talk about climate change. And here we are in October. So it's appropriate to bring this up is that climate change has joined sex, religion and politics at the Thanksgiving Day table as a topic that you don't want to bring up because nobody wants to piss off their uncle Bob. And it is often uncle Bob. And yet nine out of 10 Americans are more than willing to have a constructive conversation about this issue. So one of the most important things that we all can do, we all have this superpower is to talk about it. OK, it's one of the first most important things that we do as human beings is that we talk about what's important to us because if nobody's talking about it, we all take the lesson. Well, then this can't be very important. So it's just to say that for all the things that we need to do, talking about it and communicating about it is one of the necessary conditions for action.

And circumstances, for example, the extreme weather that we just talked about would certainly seem to be one of those things that would prompt this sort of discussion. You simply can't avoid the topic when you see the weather, the temperature, the storms, the flooding that occurred in New York City just the other day, not too far from where you are in the haven. It seems as though you can't avoid talking about it. I guess it's a question of how informed you are in discussing this and what steps you might then consider taking.

So we like to call extreme weather events teachable moments. OK, so one, we just have to recognize the environment, the information environment, we all inhabit now. The average American is exposed to like 2000 external messages a day. Your attention, one of the scarcest resources on the planet is being competed for with TikTok and Twitter and the news and your kids and advertisers and the latest soap opera that people are watching, whatever. The point is that you are being bombarded every day by lots of things that are saying, we're not about climate change. We want you to drag your attention to us. So it's actually really hard to cut through all of that with a message about this most crucial kind of an issue that we all have to deal with. And so weather extremes are one of those teachable moments because it's when human beings, when journalists, when policymakers move their attention to something that is happening, like the floods in New York, like everybody in New York was very aware of what was going on and so on. That's a huge opportunity to help people connect the dots again because just going back to what I said before, for too many people, this is still a distant problem. And what they haven't heard is that climate change is making those kinds of events more frequent and more severe. And of course, there's a huge new body of scientific field basically called attribution studies. We have our colleagues at World Weather Attribution, Climate Central are really helping to pioneer this work where in near real time, they're able to take these extreme events, do an analysis and figure out what role did climate change actually play in these. And that has really helping to transform the way we talk about it because now journalists can finally go and when they're reporting about that big storm or that big flood or that the wildfire smoke from Canada that blanketed all of the East Coast, they can say, guess what? This has the fingerprints of climate change on it. And that again changes the way that all of us in the lay public think about these issues. Not as just one off events, not just as natural disasters, they're now unnatural disasters.