 This is Think Tech Hawaii. Welcome to this Monday show, The State of the State of Hawaii. I'm your host, Stephanie Stoll Dalton. Every two weeks, the show covers important topics, events and interviews, newsworthy sources about our state, city and county, including government, business, economics, the pandemic, law, education, lifestyle, health, among many others. If you have a topic you'd like covered, please send it to questions at ThinkTechHawaii.com and I'll welcome your topic. Dr. Thomas G. White, a psychologist, and for years he was a resident of Hawaii while serving as an education researcher at the command mass schools. He reports that that experience for him was a vital and continuing influence on all of his work since at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville in research and in his teaching and for his current study of climate change. He'll talk to you today and to me about the psychology of climate change. Welcome, Dr. White. Tom, as I've known you long, welcome to the program. Thank you, Stephanie Aloha. It's a great to be there with you and thanks to everybody who has taken the time to do what they have to do to join us in this virtual space. Thank you. Thank you for participating as a guest in the state of Hawaii and for our discussion on the psychology of climate change. For us living in the islands in the midst of a giant ocean to know more about how we vary widely in our beliefs about climate change and our willingness to support government action or make changes in our personal lives certainly will help us to maybe work better together for our state. Why don't you begin by telling us about your experience with the commandment of schools? You did a pretty good job of that already, Stephanie. That was quite a long time ago, 1983 to 1990. But really, those looking back, those were some of the best years of my life. And I can say in all honesty, being employed by the, what at that time was the research arm of the commandment schools was the commandment elementary education program or KEEP. And what made that work so exciting was that KEEP had a mission. The mission was to improve reading outcomes for Native Hawaiian kids in the public schools of Hawaii. And that was just a really exciting time in my life. And I think as you already said, that experience really led me to focus the rest of my career on reading programs for low-income children. So I'm always be grateful for that. That's wonderful. And it's really precious to hear you took so much from that work and I think so many of us did. But then how did you move out of the education research domain and over into looking and studying climate change? Yeah, I think my interest in climate change also has roots going back to Hawaii. So I mean, you lucky you live Hawaii. I mean, it's so beautiful, the natural beauty of the islands, the extreme biodiversity, the ocean, the mountains, the tropical forest, the birds, the rainbows, the trade winds. I mean, I can almost feel it. Just thinking about it, to me, it was beyond beautiful and awesome. It was sacred and it was eternal. And it was just something that had to be preserved for future generations. So, you know, I know you folks in Hawaii are already looking towards the future. So I wanna congratulate you on being the first state to require 100% renewable power by 2045. That's great. I didn't know that till I started getting ready for this program. But the leaders and the government is taking responsibility and providing leadership in this manner. Of course, you know, we have the pandemic which kind of throws a wrench into everything as far as budgets, including the federal's concern, but I'm glad you noticed. And I mean, it's good to hear. You say that from far away to know that we're looking progressive out here. I mean, that was 2015, so it's been a while. And then, and of course I know that, you know, that you all out there are very much concerned about sea level rise being surrounded by the ocean, as you've mentioned. So that's another thing I did. I took a look at the 2017 report from the Hawaii Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation Commission. And I was amazed that there's a statement in there that indicates the potential for economic loss to the state of Hawaii is on the order of $19 billion. So that's really significant. The projections that you have probably seen that much of Waikiki could be underwater by 2100. And of course, that's a major economic engine for you out there. So I know you all are very much concerned about that. Well, I don't know about the, that 2100 is just sounding a little bit too close. I mean, actually not personally, but I really hadn't seen that number, but I think that's important to draw attention to. And certainly we're already getting a taste of what this would be with the hit of the pandemic on our tourism part of the economy, which is most of the part of the economy. So we're into a portion of that loss already. But I think that we're gonna have to learn how to live. And so hopefully this experience will get us some new diversification of the economy and some new ideas about what we're gonna do to avoid that because Waikiki can't, that's the golden egg. I mean, that's a very important source as you know. Well, I know you said that, Tom, you're not a per se climate scientist in the lab with your algae and your leaves and whatever they do, but I, or maybe they're looking out into space to the satellites and for that. But as a psychologist, what is your major focus on climate change? Yeah, well, I'm interested really in the question of why some people believe that the earth is warming and that human activity is the cause. And you know, why other people believe that the earth is not getting warmer or they believe that if it is getting warmer that it's just part of a natural cycle. So there's that, there's, I think you alluded to this already people are different in the degree to which they're willing to support policies. You know, for example, reducing fossil fuel consumption, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, especially carbon dioxide. And of course people are very different in terms of what they're willing to do in their personal lives. So for example, flying less or installing solar panels on their roof. So that's the general interest. It's a fascinating topic. And I found that it's endlessly fascinating actually really. So I've been interested in really learning a lot about it for the past three years since I've retired. Well, I think that you mentioned the solar panels which just makes me want to comment on how much of that actually is going on. I don't know how much of it is driven by climate change as it is by the electric bills here. We're totally, as you say, we're moving towards being off of the fossil fuels, but we're not yet. And that huge tanker is coming in every day loaded with oil just for the electricity out here. So it's rather shocking how completely depending we really are on it. So what I was just going to mention, there's another, there are always multiple factors influencing these things, right? Electricity is one that will help us move in the right direction, I hope, yeah. But yeah, so I mean, do you see, you focus on specific factors that are the features of these attitudes and beliefs that we have. And so can you tell us a little more about that in your study? Well, let me give you just some general information to get sort of set a broader context. So, you know, you've heard about deniers and you've heard about alarmists. And then, but then there's really, this is important to recognize because these are the people that are going to make a difference, the people in the middle. There's a lot of people between those extremes. There are national surveys that show, for example, there's a group of people who are concerned. So they believe that climate is happening and that it's human cause, but they aren't doing anything about it. So they're sort of concerned bystanders. And that group is 28% of the population. And there's a cautious group, about 20%, who aren't sure if global warming is happening or if it's human cause. And there's a doubtful group, about 11%, who say that if the earth is getting warmer, it's just part of a natural cycle. And there's a disengaged group, it's about 7%. People just start paying attention. So that's a total of 66%, somewhere in the middle. The alarmists are 26% and the deniers are 7% or 8%. So is that a national trend? And Hawaii would be included in that. Well, that's a great thought, a great question. Those were national figures that I just gave you. And what's interesting is that Hawaii really looks quite different from the rest of the country in terms of these kinds of climate change beliefs. There's a website that you can go to that's run by the Yale Center for Climate Change Communication. And they do a survey every year. It's got about 30 questions tapping people's climate change beliefs and their willingness to take action. All the stuff we've just talked about. And you can actually drill down to the state level even the county level. So I did that the other day and I found out this is I think it's a little interest your viewers. So in 2020, 55% of US adults agreed with this statement. Most scientists think global warming is happening. But 70% of Honolulu County residents agreed with that statement. So 15% is points higher than the national average. That's significantly different from the national average. There are counties in Texas where the percentage who agree with that statement is 31%, like less than half of what you have in Honolulu. So these Texans believe there's a lot of disagreement among scientists. Well, why wouldn't you see influencing that difference? How to account for that? Well, you know, I mean, I thought you were gonna ask me about politics, but... What? Was it all politics? Can it be all politics? I don't think it's all politics. I mean, of course, Hawaii is heavily democratic and Biden won 64% of the vote there. He has an ambitious plan to address climate change as many of you know. He wants to bring us back to the Paris climate accords and so on. And of course, I mean, I'm not gonna say that politics doesn't play a role. There's a lot of research in social science. Group identification is very important, very powerful influence on human beings' beliefs and behaviors. Political affiliation is one kind of group identity. And it's increasingly important in our lives. For instance, many young people these days won't date. They say they won't date somebody whose political beliefs are different from theirs. But I really hope that in this conversation we can get past the politics of climate change. I mean, my belief is that the political split that we see on this issue is really just the surface of things. So it's a surface manifestation of these underlying psychological processes. There are a couple of them that I'd like to talk about. I have to talk about a little bit too that I think are probably the most important. That's really interesting. Please do. Okay, so the first one, and if I could have the first graphic please, the gateway belief model, there it is. I hope everybody can see that. So this is the processes, the perception of scientific consensus. This graph will kind of help you understand it. So according to a social psychologist, Sander van der Linden, a perceived scientific agreement is a gateway belief. And what he means by that is when perceived scientific agreement increases, then the other beliefs that you can see are also affected. So belief in climate change, worry about climate change, belief in human causation, all of those things go up if the perceived scientific consensus goes up. And then there are cascading effects going down to those three things in the middle, then in turn influence support for public action. So there's several actually good experimental studies that show that this model really does operate. And I think, Sander, I think you all know that what you could call consensus messaging, it does happen in the real world. So you've all probably heard the figure 97% of climate scientists believe that global warming is happening and caused by human activity. I think that Barack Obama tweeted that out a few years and really I put it on people's radar screen. But perhaps other people have heard that the scientists disagree. We just talked about some of the people in Texas. And perhaps even that the 97% claim is a fabrication. So if you Google, wait, let me back up. We got the next graphic already, that's good, thank you. So there have been seven independent studies on this issue of scientific consensus in which the researchers do one of several things. They can send written surveys out to the scientists. They can interview the scientists or they can code abstracts of scientific papers using trained raiders. You can see the results of the graphic. So there's been these seven studies. The range is from like 91 to 100% of scientists to say that global warming is happening and that human, there's a human causality involved that human activity is at least partly responsible. And you can see that like there's a cluster there for the seven studies are 97%. But there is a really important qualification to these studies that is not reported in the media, typically, or is it mentioned by the alarmist, some alarmist politicians. These are the percentages for climate experts. So climate experts are scientists with doctoral degrees who are publishing peer-reviewed research on climate science. If you have an MS degree in physics or even a PhD and you're not publishing, then you're not an expert as is defined in these studies. So now if you Google 97% consensus, you can find lots of websites that attack the idea of the scientific consensus on climate change. These are so-called denier websites. They're usually run by non-scientists, many of whom actually have ties to the fossil fuel industry. Is that the commercial factor is in there strongly? You can find that. Some of them I've studied a lot of them and some of them if you click on the about, they'll even tell you that they've received funding from Exxon or one of the fossil fuel companies. So I would advise people to always check, what's the source? Is it a credible source? Is it based on peer-reviewed scientific research? And what is the funding? That's a critical question. But anyway, if you go to, yeah, go ahead. I just wanted to note, so these are scientists nevertheless, whether they work for Shell Oil or not, but that they will allow, I mean, they are not dedicated to the scientific method of proof of- These websites are run by non-scientists. If you check the credentials of the people who run them, they're not scientists. They're not scientists. Now, there are a few contrarian scientists. There is a 3% and that's a very interesting group. We need to have contrarian scientists because that's the way science works. We argue about science all the time and despite all these arguments over data and there are some wonderful examples of this, we don't have time to go into it. Despite all that, this strong consensus emerges. So that's really important. But I wanna go back to this, the denier websites, just as an example, if you go to these websites, you can find, so the graphic had a study in the middle by Stenhouse, which gave a 93% figure. And you can go to these denier websites. This study was a study of members of the American Meteorological Society. And these deniers websites will say, oh, the consensus is only 52%, not 97%. But if you read the original article as I have, you'll find a table of columns. On the right, there is in fact a 52%. That is for the full membership of the American Meteorological Society. So that includes your local weathermen and ladies, people who don't have training in climate science. But then on the left, in the very same article, there is a result for members of the AMS who specialize in climate science and who have published in climate science. The percentage of those people who say global warming is happening at human cost, 78%. Then in a follow-up study of those who said there was not sufficient evidence to say mostly another 10% said global warming was equally human and naturally cost. And another 5% said there was some evidence for human causation. So that's a total of 93%. But the denier website doesn't mention this. They focused, they cherry picked the 52%. So this is what's called disinformation, intentionally spreading false information or misleading information. And the goal is to delay action on climate change because these people know just as the gateway model suggests that one of the best ways to delay action is to try to undermine belief in scientific consensus. That is just frightening, isn't it? And then there's that impact then that they can have on government policy and action. Yeah, right. It's been going on for about 30 years. If you go back 30 years ago, what's really interesting is that go back 30 years ago, there was very little difference between Democrats and Republicans in terms of support for say emissions reductions. Well, is that the, what kind of research is that? Do they, I mean, are they in this quantitative versus qualitative balance as we are in education? I mean, this kind of research, are they doing this and with using the typical rigorous scientific methods, randomization and using all of those protections for finding out what the connections are? Well, it's quantitative. It is quantitative, it cannot be experimental because it's really just descriptive. They're just asking people what they think or, you know, rating what the papers say. And, you know, I've examined it. So I've read most of those studies. There are questions raised for, for example, some of the studies of abstracts, they find a lot of abstracts where they can't really determine what the position is on global warming from the abstract. So what they did in those studies is they just set those aside and then they based their percentage on the papers that did take a position. Now, that's got a lot of criticism. But again, it's, there's been an attempt to, you know, to spreading disinformation, attempt to discredit that. What they don't tell you is that same, in that same study, they actually followed up with talking to the scientists whose papers they were rating. And those, and then they asked the scientists, did we have you classified correctly or not? Well, really the raters were just being conservative and saying they didn't know because when they did that, the percentage of papers that was not taken position shrunk way down. And then what's really interesting is, you know, papers would move from the category of no position to either, yes, there's global warming or no, there's not. Just what percentage move in the author's own judgment when they could talk more, say, well, it was really in the paper, the rest of paper, guess what percentage moved into the yes category? A lot, I would guess. 95%. Right, yes, very good. You know, this research really is pretty solid for what it is. It's not experimental. You can't really assign people to believe something or not or say something or not. But, you know, it's about as solid as it could be. And it's really been unfairly characterized on some. Well, we're talking about the psychological processes here. So now we've talked about, can you just go back over those two and talk about the second one that maybe fully coverage it? Yeah, yeah, the second one. So, but I want to be very clear about this. The 97% consensus doesn't mean that 97% of the scientists say we should take a particular policy action. What the scientists are saying is that the climate experts are saying that we think there's a problem and we should do something about it. But that's something really depends on morals. So let's talk quickly about morals. Let's just go right to the graphic here. Graphic number three. So this is from a social psychologist, Jonathan Hyde. And what he finds, people are born with what he calls these moral sensitivities. They're kind of like taste buds. You know, we have sweet sour salt or bitter and umami, which is soy sauce. Thank goodness for that. We wouldn't be able to enjoy our tuna with wasabi. But he finds that these differ as a function of political leanings. So care is really being concerned about harm to people and care for people. I'll do the liberty one that's, you know, concerned with liberty and oppression, like for example, oppression by a government taking liberties and finally sanctity over here is concerned with sensitivity to threats to human health and sacred values. Now, some of the research supporting this is really interesting because what they'll do, for example, they will present people with two different versions of a speech on climate change. One version is free market friendly. For example, the US could lead the world in green technology. And the other would be heavily regulatory emphasizing government restrictions on emissions and from the burning of fossil fuels. And what's fascinating when Republicans hear the free market speech, they're more likely to say that the earth is warming. I may repeat that, Republicans are more likely to say the earth is warming. In other words, they believe in the science more when they get the free market framing. So the implication is that they're not any science, they just don't like the climate change solutions that are put forth by the Democrats. Other studies show that Republican support for government action on climate change is increased when the framing is human health, air pollution and its negative impacts. So I'm gonna wrap up here quick. No, but on that, can you summarize that again, please, because the Republicans will when presented with anything that's a solution from the other side find themselves reticent. But if they get other information, they're positive on it, that's actually. So what it's saying is another way to say it is that what drives a lot of climate change beliefs is what is called solution aversion. So the Republicans are afraid of the solutions. And it's not that they are anti-science, they're afraid of the solutions, which is, so what we have to do is we have to come up with solutions that really draw on the moral values or moral sensitivities of all the constituent groups. Very importantly, we could pull in conservatives if we talk more about threats to human health. What is the co-benefit of reducing cold burning is going to save a lot of lives. It'll reduce the number of deaths by cancer, reduce problems with asthma, and so on. So that's an argument you can make that everybody should be able to get behind. Yeah. So that's the point of this, these moral sensitivities kind of thing. Can you come up with another example like that? Well, the other one, there are a number of framing studies. There's another one, I mentioned the one about human health, but there are others where they make climate change a more of a patriotic thing. We can address, as a country, we can be leaders that lead the world, America the Great, a kind of thing. And that would appeal to one of the columns that I had in the chart was, I think it's called authority. And so if you make an appeal to nationalism, that also can pull in more conservative folks. So there are numbers of studies like this. And I think they really are pointing us in the right direction, which is basically, let's start talking solutions, and let's stop arguing about the science. Let's talk solutions. That is really interesting, Tom. Yes. Well, did you wanna summarize briefly, and then we'll need to wrap. Yeah, I think just to go loop back around to the question of why, why have Hawaiians seem to be ahead of the curve on climate change? So democratic politics aside, there is that very real thing of sea level rise that has to be very important. I mean, just based on what I've said tonight, I think we could probably say that it's apparent that your educators and your media sources are doing a pretty good job of building trust in scientific expertise, helping people weed out unreliable sources and disinformation, that's very important. Then finally, there's no research on this, but I wonder if native Hawaiian culture and values hasn't played a role here. So, there's the concept of aloha aina, which means love of the land. It's a central idea in native Hawaiian thought. There's the related idea of mama, which means to preserve and protect. So I think maybe that's had something to do with why you're doing so well in Hawaiian. That's a sort of perspective that's needed in places like Texas. Yeah, evidently. That's very helpful and very much important to our whole aloha state notion of how we do respect the cultural influences here and wanna live by them and with them and through them. So that's really beautiful, Tom. Thank you. But it is aloha time and we'll have to wrap it up. So I'm Stephanie Stoll Dalton and this is the state of the state of Hawaii on the Think Tech Livestreaming Network series. So we have been talking remotely with Dr. Tom White about the psychology of climate change. And I think we've learned some things about how to move forward with our challenges and communications on this. So I'll see you again in two weeks on the next program, the state of the state of Hawaii. Mahalo for your attention, everyone.