Public Perceptions of How Long Air Pollution and Carbon Dioxide Remain in the Atmosphere

Abstract

The atmospheric residence time of carbon dioxide is hundreds of years, many orders of magnitude longer than that of common air pollution, which is typically hours to a few days. However, randomly selected respondents in a mail survey in Allegheny County, PA (N = 119) and in a national survey conducted with MTurk (N = 1,013) judged the two to be identical (in decades), considerably overestimating the residence time of air pollution and drastically underestimating that of carbon dioxide. Moreover, while many respondents believed that action is needed today to avoid climate change (regardless of cause), roughly a quarter held the view that if climate change is real and serious, we will be able to stop it in the future when it happens, just as we did with common air pollution. In addition to assessing respondents' understanding of how long carbon dioxide and common air pollution stay in the atmosphere, we also explored the extent to which people correctly identified causes of climate change and how their beliefs affect support for action. With climate change at the forefront of politics and mainstream media, informing discussions of policy is increasingly important. Confusion about the causes and consequences of climate change, and especially about carbon dioxide's long atmospheric residence time, could have profound implications for sustained support of policies to achieve reductions in carbon dioxide emissions and other greenhouse gases.

Efficacy, Action, and Support for Reducing Climate Change Risks

“…We recruited U.S. respondents nationally through Amazon's Mechanical Turk (MTurk) and through the GfK Knowledge Panel (GfK) to answer questions on efficacy beliefs, knowledge, concern, and policy support (Crosman et al., ). MTurk is an opt‐in survey platform, but still more representative of the U.S. public than student samples (Levay, Freese, & Druckman, ; Paolacci & Chandler, ), producing results similar to those from conventional samples across a wide variety of social and behavioral science experiments and surveys (Amir & Rand, ; Clifford, Jewell, & Waggoner, ; Dryden, Morgan, Bostrom, & de Bruin, ; Gosling & Mason, ; Horton, Rand, & Zeckhauser, ; Simons & Chabris, ; Weinberg, Freese, & McElhattan, ). KnowledgePanel is an address‐based U.S. population sample representative of the U.S. adult population (Crosman et al., ).…”

Reflections on an interdisciplinary collaboration to inform public understanding of climate change, mitigation, and impacts

“…Reprinted with permission from ref. 48 scientists have become increasingly interested in learning how to communicate their expertise more effectively. The psychology of decision making has progressed beyond laboratory studies, toward developing communications and interventions that inform real-world decisions.…”

“…Once the data were collected, Wändi and Ann guided Rachel through the statistical analyses, using standard social science methods that, despite years of coauthoring studies like this, still remain somewhat mysterious to Granger. Readers interested in the details of these analyses can find them in the paper we published in Risk Analysis (48). Our main finding is that people do not know that carbon dioxide remains in the atmosphere much longer than conventional air pollution.…”

Soil carbon dioxide efflux in conilon coffee (Coffea canephora Pierre ex A. Froehner) plantations in different phenological phases in tropical climate in Brazil

“…Climate change has caused increasing concern worldwide due to the high emissions of anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO2) and its residence time in the atmosphere being the focus of many recent studies with the aim of understanding its causes and consequences (Chang et al, 2016;Raj, 2016;Arneth et al, 2017;Dryden et al, 2017).…”