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People Believe In Climate Change Once the Weather Screws Them
One of the major impediments to actually doing something about the changing climate is that some people just don’t see the problem. Not qualified climate scientists—they’re all pretty much agreed that it's happening and it's our fault—but people who have more power than expertise, like Australia’s new prime minister, don't believe that people should have to do a damn thing differently.If all the consensus and evidence won’t convince a climate-skeptic, can anything? As it turns out, there is one way, but it’s not pretty: just hit their house with a hurricane.A study published this week in the journal Psychological Science found that following Hurricanes Irene and Sandy, New Jersey residents were more apt to prefer a politician with a green platform than before the two hurricanes. Those who were “significantly affected by Hurricane Sandy” were found to be especially likely to implicitly prefer the green politician, even when the politician suggests something as odious as higher taxes.Choose your cliché, I guess: all politics is local, or Americans are the least empathetic pieces of shit ever. The researchers politely skewed to the latter. "Americans tend to vote more from a self-interested perspective rather than demand that their government affect change," said lead researcher Laurie Rudman of Rutgers University. As long as it happens to someone else—like way out in Colorado, as it has this year—it doesn't resonate with people. But when what was heretofore abstract floods your home, you see the downside.It’s grim to consider that it’s going to take each and everyone’s home getting hit by Earth’s increasingly erratic weather before we elect politicians who will actually bite the bullet and really get down on reducing our carbon footprint. But if there’s a silver lining to this unseasonable storm cloud it’s that at the rate we’re going, it won’t take that long.