Climate Propaganda Breakthrough? “… binary data creates an illusion of sudden shifts …”

Essay by Eric Worrall

Inducing a motivational sense of acute loss in the general public might just be a matter of messaging.

Why climate change fades into the background – and how to change that

The public is tuning out the seemingly slow warming of the world, but it doesn’t have to be that way, argue Grace Liu and Rachit Dubey

By Rachit Dubey and Grace Liu

For a long time, many climate scientists and advocates held onto an optimistic belief: when the impacts of global warming became undeniable, people and governments would finally act decisively. Perhaps a devastating hurricane, heatwave or flood – or even a cascade of disasters – would make the severity of the problem impossible to ignore, spurring large-scale action. Yet, even as disasters mount, climate change remains low on voters’ priority lists and policy responses are tepid.

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That led us to ask: could binary climate data – yes-or-no indicators such as “lake froze” vs “no freeze” – make people sit up and take notice better than graphs showing gradual temperature rise?

We tested this idea in a series of experiments. Participants were shown one of two graphs: one displayed a fictional town’s rising winter temperatures; the other showed whether its lake froze each year. Importantly, both graphs captured the same underlying climate trend. But people’s responses were very different.

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Why? We found that binary data creates an illusion of sudden shifts. When people saw a series of winters when the lake froze, followed by years when it didn’t, they perceived a clear “before” and “after”, even though the change was gradual.

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Grace Liu is at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania and Rachit Dubey is at UCLA

The abstract of the study;

Article
Published: 17 April 2025

Binary climate data visuals amplify perceived impact of climate change

Grace Liu, Jake C. Snell, Thomas L. Griffiths & Rachit Dubey 

Nature Human Behaviour (2025)

Abstract

For much of the global population, climate change appears as a slow, gradual shift in daily weather. This leads many to perceive its impacts as minor and results in apathy (the ‘boiling frog’ effect). How can we convey the urgency of the crisis when its impacts appear so subtle? Here, through a series of large-scale cognitive experiments (N = 799), we find that presenting people with binary climate data (for example, lake freeze history) significantly increases the perceived impact of climate change (Cohen’s d = 0.40, 95% confidence interval 0.26–0.54) compared with continuous data (for example, mean temperature). Computational modelling and follow-up experiments (N = 398) suggest that binary data enhance perceived impact by creating an ‘illusion’ of sudden shifts. Crucially, our approach does not involve selective data presentation but rather compares different datasets that reflect equivalent trends in climate change over time. These findings, robustly replicated across multiple experiments, provide a cognitive basis for the ‘boiling frog’ effect and offer a psychologically grounded approach for policymakers and educators to improve climate change communication while maintaining scientific accuracy.

Read more (paywalled): https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-025-02183-9

The scientists behind this research seem to be struggling with their own audience issues. They were pushing the same argument back in April;

From the full article, the fictional town example was apparently inspired by changes in freezing over of Lake Carnegie near Princeton, New Jersey. Apparently the lake doesn’t freeze over much anymore. But between 1900 to now, New Jersey’s population rose from just over two million people to 9.5 million people. A rise of 7.5 million people is a lot of additional pollution, industry and home heating, all of which could have contributed to slightly warmer winters and darkening of lake ice.

There is an additional problem, the binary approach might not have the broad appeal the scientists are hoping to achieve.

Binary thinking is how you create fanatics, some people are drawn to simple answers, even when those answers are a less than complete picture of what is happening. But arguably most people whose minds are befuddled by simple answers are already climate activists, there has been more than enough emotive climate propaganda over the years to reach people who have impaired critical thinking skills.

Perhaps the scientists need to test their theory by applying their own binary propaganda breakthrough to how they promote their theory – “either you listen to us, or the public loses interest in climate change.”. Though I suspect after years of embarrassing missed predictions, nothing anyone does in the foreseeable future can save the climate movement from the weight of its baggage of failure.