Climate advocates have struggled to persuade half of the U.S. public of the need to do more to slow the pace of global warming.
But even as climate scientists are sounding louder and louder alarms about the urgency of the situation, they disagree among themselves about how to proceed.
As political scientists who study the politics of climate change, we wanted to find out how to get more people to take the risks of global warming seriously. So we designed an experiment.
Two approaches
Dealing with climate change requires two kinds of policies. One involves attempts to slow down the rate of global warming. This approach, which experts call “mitigation,” takes aim at what's causing the problem by reducing the amount of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases accumulating in the atmosphere.
