A memorial rests in the shadow of the Chernobyl nuclear plant.Photo: Matti Paavonen

As a visiting scholar last year at the Linz Institute for Organic Solar Cells, I met Valery N. Bliznyuk, a visiting professor at Linz and a permanent faculty member at Western Michigan University. His fascinating work in materials at molecular and nanotech levels includes work on polymer photovoltaics.

Over dinner, he told me he hailed from Kiev (or Kyiv in Ukrainian), and the subject of Chernobyl inevitably arose. And now, with the disaster at Fukushima dredging up memories of that meltdown 25 years ago, Bliznyuk’s recollections of being a scientist laboring in an informational black hole seemed particularly resonant.

Yes, he told me, as a young physicist he had lived through the 1986 disaster at the Ukrainian nuclear plant about 60 miles north of his hometown.

Bliznyuk’s personal knowledge of Chernobyl began in the most banal way. He first learned of the world’s greatest nuclear power disaster from a routine news broadcast, not a breaking bulletin. As part of the same nightly newscast on April 26, 1986, two dispassionate sentences announced, “A fire has broken out at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station. The situation is under control.”

More bits of information emerged slowly. Several days into the crisis, the Voice of America (VOA) — this was during the era of the Soviet Union, and VOA offered an important outside source of news — reported that radioactivity had escaped, but the winds blowing southeast to northwest had carried all the nuclear debris toward Scandinavia. Meanwhile, the Soviet media admitted that though fires continued to rage, “All measures to keep it under control are being taken.”

Four days into the crisis, Bliznyuk and his colleagues showed up for their traditional May Day barbecue bash. At that point in the Soviet Union, most of the revolutionary stuff associated with the day had given way for an excuse to pig out and drink. And party Bliznyuk and his comrades did, they cooked shish-kebabs over an open fire, guzzled booze, and got wild as a rock ‘n’ roll band played. They were happy they hadn’t heeded the warning of a grumpy geologist friend who had called each of them earlier that day.

“Don’t go to the barbecue,” he warned. “Stay indoors. I can’t tell you what’s wrong. But don’t go outside.” As Bliznyuk remarked to me a quarter century later, his uptight colleague had “some secret only known to the Geological Society. But I was young at the time. I had prepared for the [barbecue] over many months. So I went, and I had a great time.”

The following day another ominous call came from an older friend and colleague. “I can’t tell you what is happening, but I’m on a team deactivating an awful mess. Stay at home. Don’t buy anything at the market. Close all your windows. And, by the way, your clothes reek with radiation.”

Everyone who had gone to the picnic got a similar call, and everyone was scared witless.

Bliznyuk reacted as a physicist. He went straight to the lab, took off the clothes and shoes he had worn the day before and checked them out with a Geiger counter. “Damn!” He recalled. “I had never seen such high readings.” He reconstructed what was going on from the calls and news reports and the mega dose of radioactivity he had just measured, coming to the conclusion something bad had happened at Chernobyl.

The masses — those without knowledgeable colleagues or access to Geiger counters, those who were assured by their masters that “everything was under control” — continued life as usual, having no way of knowing about the serious amount of nuclear poison they were ingesting in the foods they ate and the liquids they drank, or what was falling on their bodies every time they stepped outside and entering their lungs every time they breathed.

Slowly, word came through the public’s grapevine that something was just not right. Because the radiation was so great at the melted reactor, the cleanup cycled through lots of workers who quickly received the maximum — and beyond — safe dose and had to move on. When these workers returned from the front lines of this battle of Chernobyl, tongues wagged. Soon, millions knew about the nuclear disaster even with the Soviet broadcasts droning on about the valiant measures that “kept things under control.”

A great exodus began in early May from Kiev, although the radiation pattern — and areas evacuated — were concentrated north of the plant, in Belarus. Between that month and June, the women and children of Kiev left. The city transformed into a town of men careful to avoid vegetables and fruits picked after April 26 or meat from animals slaughtered during the same time frame. “You tried to eat only things produced before the catastrophe or if they passed muster under a Geiger counter,” Bliznyuk explained.

A forest behind the plant was dubbed the Red Forest (perhaps with an additional touch intentional irony given the official stonewalling) after radiation cooked the trees and turned them a ginger color. The forest was bulldozed and buried in impermeable shrouds.

Bliznyuk said many more died than either the Soviets or the international community admitted (a point still the focus of a lively debate between those who say the count was lower than first estimated and those who insist it must be higher.

But the psychological toll overshadowed everything else. When might cancer strike? Pregnant women stressed over deformities their babies might develop. Everyone lost any lingering trust in the Soviet system, and respect for science and scientists was greatly diminished.

Only when they had buried the remains of the destroyed reactor under the sarcophagus of cement, Bliznyuk said, did the women and children return. The Chernobyl area and the town of Pripyat remain vacant except for those studying the devastation. Perhaps surprisingly, the undamaged portions of the plant remained active until 2000, shut down only after Ukraine convinced the rest of Europe and the U.S. into paying for a “New Safe Confinement and Spent Fuel Storage Facility” [PDF] for the destroyed reactor and its fuel rods.

For Bliznyuk, Chernobyl greatly changed his views on energy generation: “Solar power has a bright future. Not so for nuclear,” he said, well before Japan’s current nightmare.

This article was syndicated with permission from Miller-McCune, an online and print magazine that focuses on practical options for solving serious problems, particularly if the options are backed by quality research and evidence.

This snowlady needs to rewrite her sign if she wants to be 6.3 percent more convincing.Photo: Amy Goodman

Are you convinced climate change is real? What about global warming?

Yes, that second question is redundant. But new research finds the two labels, which are widely used interchangeably, evoke remarkably different responses among self-described Republicans.

Writing in the journal Public Opinion Quarterly, a research team led by University of Michigan psychologist Jonathon Schuldt reports Republicans are far more skeptical of “global warming” than of “climate change.” In an experiment conducted as part of a large survey, the researchers found 44 percent of Republicans endorsed the notion that “global warming” is real, but 60.2 percent said the same of “climate change.”

In contrast, 86 to 87 percent of Democrats endorsed the reality of a changing climate, no matter which descriptive phrase was used. This means the partisan divide over the issue is either overwhelmingly enormous or potentially bridgeable, depending upon the terminology one uses.

Schuldt and his coauthors, Sara Konrath and Norbert Schwarz, inserted a question into the 2009 American Life Panel survey, conducted by the RAND Corporation. Most of the 2,261 panelists were recruited from respondents to the Survey of Consumer Attitudes conducted by the University of Michigan.

Half responded to this statement: “You may have heard about the idea that the world’s temperature may have been going up over the past 100 years, a phenomenon sometimes called ‘global warming.’ What is your personal opinion regarding whether or not this has been happening?”

The other half were presented with that exact same statement, except the words “going up” were replaced by “changing,” and the term “global warming” was replaced by “climate change.” All then reported their belief on a seven-point scale, from “Definitely has not been happening” to “Definitely has been happening.”

Overall, 74 percent of respondents either definitely or tentatively believed “climate change” was real, but that number went down to 67.7 percent when the “global warming” wording was used.

The researchers found this difference was driven almost entirely by self-described Republicans. For Democrats, the difference was nearly nonexistent, with 86.4 percent endorsing climate change and 86.9 percent acknowledging global warming. Among Independents, 74 percent endorsed climate change, while 69.5 percent acknowledged global warming.

Why do the two labels provoke such different reactions among a specific subset of the population? Schuldt and his colleagues propose some possible answers.

“Global warming entails a directional prediction of rising temperatures that is easily discredited by any cold spell,” they note, “whereas ‘climate change’ lacks a directional commitment and easily accommodates unusual weather of any kind.”

This is an important point: A separate study, which we recently described, found belief in global warming is greater among people who are experiencing warm temperatures at the moment the question is asked — even if they’re indoors.

“Moreover, ‘global warming’ carries a stronger connotation of human causation, which has long been questioned by conservatives,” the researchers add. “Both of these aspects make ‘global warming’ a more appealing frame for those who favor the status quo in climate policy.”

These findings point to a problem for pollsters, whose “choice of term seems somewhat haphazard” when surveying public opinion on the topic. Any polls that suggest swings of public opinion on this topic should be read with caution, taking note of the specific terminology that was used.

In addition, the findings have obvious implications for climate scientists and others who are trying to influence public opinion. They suggest “global warming” has got to go.

Either by design (the researchers found conservative think tanks prefer “global warming” to “climate change”) or because of how our minds processes the terms (“global warming” seems to lead to an expectation of noticeably higher temperatures here and now), the concept of “global warming” meets significantly more resistance than “climate change.”

What’s in a name? In this case, a more approachable way to frame an all-important argument.

This article was syndicated with permission from Miller-McCune, an online and print magazine that focuses on practical options for solving serious problems, particularly if the options are backed by quality research and evidence.

A scene from Into Eternity, a documentary that looks at Finland’s plans to store the country’s nuclear waste for 100,000 years. Yep … 100,000. Photo: Posiva

The first documentary that Netflix might slot into their science fiction category, director Michael Madsen’s Into Eternity, is an eerily fascinating look at the planet’s most unique construction project.

Known as Onkalo — “hiding place” in Finnish — this massive work in the north of Finland, which began construction in the last century and won’t be completed until the next one, is a series of concrete-reinforced underground tunnels meant to store the country’s nuclear waste. And it’s designed to last until the waste is harmless — a full 100,000 years.

Say it again — 100,000 years. The figure is mind-boggling, and that’s one of the points the film — currently playing in New York and soon to be released around the country — sets out to make. How do you plan something that’s supposed to last that long? How do you build it? And when it’s finished, should you warn future generations what lies 500 feet under the Finnish forest or hope that the project will be forgotten and no one will unintentionally stumble upon it?

Onkalo is, in fact, the first project of its kind, so the engineers and scientists interviewed in the film are definitely pioneers of a sort. “Everyone is waiting to see if Finland can pull this off,” said Madsen (not to be confused with the Reservoir Dogs star) during a phone interview. “No one knows the right way to do this, and no one knows if it will work. That means even the nuclear safety authorities don’t know what the standards are.”

Fact is, something needs to be done with the estimated 250,000 tons of nuclear waste worldwide. Right now, interim storage is available above ground in steel containers submerged in water, but no one seems to know how long this solution will be viable. And as one of the film’s talking heads puts it, “The world above ground is unstable.”

Which is why the Finns decided to build Onkalo in solid bedrock that’s been around for about 1 billion years and is not susceptible to earthquakes. Construction, which began in 2003, will eventually consist of 2.5 miles of tunnels organized in what is described as a “Russian doll” configuration — if the barrier to one tunnel fails, the barrier to another can mitigate any possible consequences. And once construction is finished sometime in the 22nd century, a concrete seal will be cast at the tunnel mouth, and shut for all eternity. Then the land above it will be backfilled and eventually returned to its natural state.

All well and good. The plan seems, on its surface, well thought out. But beyond construction discussions, Into Eternity gets into some seriously futuristic issues. For one thing, Madsen films a lot of the tunnel footage in loving tracking shots, including some scenes of construction equipment set to the strains of Jean Sibelius’ “Valse Triste.” It’s like watching a real-life version of that scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey, where shots of a spinning space station are set to Strauss’ “Blue Danube” waltz:

But it is Madsen’s questions about future generations, and what they should be told about the project, that really set the film spinning off into the province of writers like William Gibson and Joe Haldeman. Most of the scientists don’t seem worried about human intrusion and even question if future generations will understand the purpose of Onkalo or even have advanced enough technology to penetrate it. Who knows, after all, if 100,000 years into the future, humankind will have regressed technologically or left the planet for a new home in the stars?

Which is why some experts believe the project should be left untended and forgotten, or, as one scientist puts it, “to remember forever to forget.” But others think the site should be marked with warnings, although when they start thinking about exactly how to communicate with future generations, you can almost see the brains of these intellects start to sizzle with frustration. What kind of spoken language will Future Human be using? Will pictograms do the trick? And if so, who knows if today’s universal symbol for nuclear danger will have any meaning thousands of years into the future?

It all comes under what one commentator labels “decisions under uncertainty” — what you know you don’t know, and what you don’t know you don’t know.

“I think what is most significant about the project is that these experts, the people building it, are more inclined to talk about the technical aspects rather than the actual problem, which is the time span and should we warn the future or not,” said Madsen. “It is possible to understand the argument that it should be forgotten, which the Finnish engineers tend to advocate. But how do you create forgetting? And if you go for that one, you have to be overly confident in what you’re building — ‘We’re giving a 100,000-year warranty on this building’ — and that is hubris.”

Hubris? Or faith in the future? Into Eternity tends to leave the answer up to the viewer, but as far as Madsen is concerned, the answer to those questions is self-evident.

“We have to watch the future,” he said. “To assume it is foolproof — that’s nonsense.”

This article was syndicated with permission from Miller-McCune, an online and print magazine that focuses on practical options for solving serious problems, particularly if the options are backed by quality research and evidence.

Transportation experts say there’s barely enough space on the roads in China’s largest cities for the 35 million cars that were bought during the past decade of frenzied consumerism. Photo: Remko Tanis

The new Great Wall of China is the “Great Wall” of cars stuck in city traffic, researchers say, and it will take more than restrictions on new license plates and car registrations to break the gridlock.

The problem is, there’s barely enough space on the roads in China’s largest cities for the 35 million cars that were bought during the past decade of frenzied consumerism, according to transportation experts at the University of California, Berkeley, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In the ancient capital city of Xi’an, home of the buried armies of terracotta warriors, Lee Schipper said the joke is that if you want to drive in through the North Gate, you call your friend who’s leaving through the South Gate, so you can arrange to take his place. Schipper is a senior project scientist at UC Berkeley’s Global Metro Studies Center and a coauthor of a 2010 study on China’s crowded cities.

“The number of cars is going up much faster in China than the length of the roads in the cities,” Schipper said. “The greatest ‘communist’ society ever invented doesn’t know what to do. That’s what worries me. Cars are not something any kind of government can easily control if they’re cheap to buy and cheap to drive.”

In Shanghai, a city of more than 20 million where new car registrations are restricted to 6,000 monthly, commuter traffic has slowed to six to 10 miles per hour, well under the speed of a bicycle. The traffic’s a mess, even though only 20 percent of all daily trips in Shanghai are by car, compared to 80 percent in U.S. cities. For the majority of Shanghaians, who are walking or biking or waiting at the bus stops, it means breathing in a lot of bad air.

“It’s what I call hyper-motorization,” Schipper said. “China’s cities have expanded to make room for cars, but congestion levels have spiraled upward and average speeds downward. Things freeze up regularly.”

Building more roads and adding lanes, as China is doing, will not solve the problem, Schipper said. The amount of urbanized land in Beijing has tripled since 1990, but now commutes are longer. China could build more cities, but the new roads would fill up quickly, too.

Schipper and coauthors Wei-Shiuen Ng and Yang Chen, Ph.D. students at UC Berkeley and MIT, respectively, suggest that China has a window of opportunity to solve its traffic woes before car ownership jumps much higher. If China were to hike its fuel tax on gasoline, levy tolls at rush hour, raise parking fees, encourage compact development along bus lines, and give up more road space to cyclists and fast bus routes, it could get the traffic moving and avoid potentially much worse gridlock, the researchers found.

“Every motorist should know what it really costs to bring a car into a zone where land space is scarce,” Schipper said.

Most people in China still travel by bus, bike, or on foot. There are only 18 private vehicles for every 1,000 Chinese — roughly the level of ownership back in the 1920s in the United States. Today, there are 740 private vehicles for every 1,000 Americans. The average resident of China travels only 600 miles per year by bus, train, car, or plane, compared to 15,000 motorized miles per capita for Americans.

But China is now the top auto market in the world, having surpassed the U.S. in sales in 2009. Last year, General Motors Co. sold more cars in China than in the U.S. If current trends continue, the research shows, China can expect 146 million private cars by 2020, or four times the number it has now.

“My role is not telling China what to do,” said Schipper, who has traveled to the country 20 times in the past decade to talk to city and transportation planners. “I can point to the consequences of what they do. The present path in China is towards more and more cars. Smaller towns of under 2 million people are not as crowded, but then people flee to the smaller towns and they get gummed up, too.”

This month, Beijing officials launched a lottery for new license plates to restrict new cars in the city to 240,000 in 2011. Last year, more than 700,000 cars were sold in the city. But the measure may backfire, Schipper said. Beijing residents rushed to buy 20,000 cars the day before the lottery went into effect; and people will likely drive their cars more now, sharing them with family and friends. Events such as the 10-day, 60-mile traffic jam on the outskirts of Beijing last summer could become more common.

A number of Chinese cities, including Beijing, are building rapid transit systems in which buses can travel in segregated lanes with priority at intersections. But these efforts to boost mass transportation are being overwhelmed.

“The Chinese don’t have much time,” Schipper said. “The longer they wait or take missteps, the harder it will be to recover. More and more consumers will be used to owning and using cars, and city development will be distorted increasingly towards a car-oriented pattern. The experience from nearby cities in Asia — Bangkok, Jakarta, and Manila, to give three notorious examples — suggest that recovering from this pattern will be very, very difficult.”

Related:

• Beijing’s booming car ownership creates traffic nightmare

This article was syndicated with permission from Miller-McCune, an online and print magazine that focuses on practical options for solving serious problems, particularly if the options are backed by quality research and evidence.

Honker flew the coop and dodged a bullet.Photo: Alan Vernon

At first glance, Crescent Lake, a shallow body abutting a cornfield in upper Snohomish County, Wash., would appear to be perfectly pristine. Mallard and pintail ducks skirt the edges of its banks on waters that — in this contaminated age at least — would seem to be as untouched as anyone could hope.

But as wildlife biologist Martha Jordan explained on a recent rain-sodden Northwest afternoon, the lake has become lethal to the celebrated trumpeter swan, the world’s largest waterfowl.

The trumpeter swan, or cygnus buccinators, winters along hundreds of miles of the Pacific Northwest. For more than a decade, however, large numbers of these birds have died from lead shot — not shot fired at them, but historical deposits of shot fired from shotguns of days gone by.

The lead can be picked up as grit or consumed by accident along with the swan’s food source. Because birds don’t have teeth, they use the grit to help break up or grind their food in their gizzards.

“Waterfowl think lead shot is grit,” said Jordan, the Washington Working Group chair for the Trumpeter Swan Society. “They eat it for digestion, then it gets into their bloodstreams. It only takes three pellets to kill a trumpeter swan.” A single shotgun shell can contain more than 250 lead pellets.

Wildlife biologists began to find dead swans in lakes and fields in 2001. To date, at least 1,600 swans have died, mainly in northwestern Washington and southwestern British Columbia.

Before the 1800s, trumpeter swans could be spotted in every continental U.S. state and across sub-Arctic Canada. Before the turn of the last century, the Hudson’s Bay Company shipped many trumpeter swan skins to Europe. Its quills made the best pens and also were in demand for hats, clothing, and powder-puffs. By the late 1800s, most thought the species was extinct. It wasn’t until 1919 that two nests were found in Yellowstone National Park, although some others apparently survived in more remote portions of Alaska and Canada. By 1935, it’s estimated that there were fewer than 100 trumpeter swans left.

Today, with trumpeter swans protected from hunting, it’s estimated that the population represents less than a third of their pre-colonial numbers. Some 26,000 trumpeter swans breed and nest in Alaska and winter along the Pacific coast from the end of October through mid-March.

Their range runs from west of the Cascade mountain range to as far south as Oregon’s Willamette Valley. Washington’s Whatcom and Skagit counties have the largest wintering population in the contiguous U.S.

Before European settlement in this area, the swan’s natural winter habitat was found in Puget Sound’s intertidal estuaries and marshlands, where it mostly fed on aquatic vegetation.

But the wintering swans disappeared after settlers erected dikes and drained the marshlands. Swans began a comeback in the early 1960s, Jordan said, after discovering that agriculture here also made a good winter food source.

A few miles away, Jordan pulls over to watch a couple of hundred trumpeter swans feasting on a field of harvested corn. To replenish their fat from the breeding season, she said, they come here to eat waste corn from the harvest. Trouble is, there’s also lead in these fields.

The fields here can be just as lethal as lakes, even though their lead concentrations are lower.

Lead shot for use in hunting waterfowl has been illegal in the United States since 1991. And about half of the states have some sort of restrictions on lead shot, while others are considering them.

In a high-profile effort to assist the recovering California condor population, which scavenges on carcasses often pockmarked by lead, the California legislature passed a bill in 2008 mandating that hunters in condor habitats use non-lead-only ammunition. However, a 2010 bill to ban lead shot from California’s system of wildlife management areas failed to pass in the state’s senate.

While the Environmental Protection Agency has been petitioned to ban all lead in ammunition, it is still legal to use lead shot to hunt pheasants and shoot doves, and for skeet and trap target ranges. So lead shot is still being deposited in various habitats (as are lead sinkers from fishing gear).

Once lead is scattered to the wind, Jordan noted, it stays where it lies. It doesn’t “magically disappear.”

The first indication of lead poisoning in birds is lethargy. But by the time the swans start showing lead’s effects, it’s too late to save them, said University of Washington wildlife biologist Mike Smith. Their life span after ingestion is only about three weeks.

Of nearly 2,200 swan carcasses collected from 2000-2009, 71 percent of their deaths were lead-related.

Doug Zimmer, a spokesman with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, explained that in the last decade, researchers radio-collared and tracked more than 500 swans to figure out where they were feeding and roosting and ingesting the lead shot. (A PDF of their report is here.)

Eventually, the collared birds led the researchers to Judson Lake. After taking samples of the lake bottom, they discovered lead in its sediment.

The 100-acre lake, which spans the U.S.-Canada border, has the heaviest lead concentration of any known lake and is thought to be the source of 70 percent of swan poisoning over the last decade. Over the years, its polluting lead shot has sifted down into the shallow lake’s soft mud bottom — which is unfortunately also within easy reach of the long-necked swans.

Thus, the researchers’ first priority became keeping the birds off the lake altogether.

“Keeping staff full time to haze the swans off Judson Lake is not a long-term solution,” said U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service environmental contaminant specialist Cindy Schexnider. “So, we’re monitoring the swans with a webcam.”

Smith says that for three years, the researchers succeeded in keeping the birds completely off Judson Lake.

“Last year,” Smith said, “we built a 35-acre exclusion area covered with bamboo poles and mylar tape and allowed the swans to use areas of the lake with very low lead densities.”

Largely as a result, mortalities of the Pacific coast trumpeter swan population from lead shot ingestion have declined by 82 percent since 2008.

Even so, Smith says in western Washington, swan lead poisoning is down about 71 percent from its highs earlier in the decade.

Although such statistics are impressively positive, Jordan, for one, hasn’t declared victory. “We’re not winning the war with lead poisoning,” Jordan said, “we’re not even coming close.”

At Judson Lake, where some 800 swans spend the winter each year, one hundred have died in the last two years.

A permanent fix at Judson Lake might involve hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of dredging to sift out the lead. But in these tough economic times, Jordan says there’s no money for such solutions. So, for now, the best that can be done is to simply keep the swans off the lake.

Meanwhile, researchers expect that Judson Lake likely represents only the tip of a broader lead pollution iceberg.

“As the swan population increases and expands further south,” Zimmer said, “the swans will tell us with their dead and dying bodies where there is more lead.”

This article was syndicated with permission from Miller-McCune, an online and print magazine that focuses on practical options for solving serious problems, particularly if the options are backed by quality research and evidence.

Climate skepticism fading … Must. Buy. Air conditioner.

How do you get people to understand that climate change is occurring? The question frustrates scientists and policymakers, who face a disbelieving public prone to discounting discomforting data.

A newly published study suggests one answer is to set aside the charts and statistics in favor of a more visceral approach. To put it simply: If you want to convert a skeptic, turn up the thermostat.

Jane Risen of the University of Chicago and Clayton Critcher of the University of California, Berkeley, provide evidence that belief in global warming increases along with the temperature one is currently experiencing. The researchers attribute this to a phenomenon they call “visceral fit.”

“We suggest that while experiencing a visceral state, people will judge future states of the world that fit with that experience to be more likely,” they write in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. As they see it, uncomfortable feelings of warmth stimulate “fluent mental representations” of heat, which give “an inference of validity” to arguments the planet is warming.

Risen and Critcher describe seven studies that support and refine this thesis. In the first, 67 American university students “were taken outside under the pretense of judging the height of several campus landmarks,” they write. The exercise occurred on several days in September and October, when the temperature ranged from 49 to 89 degrees.

The students filled out questionnaires in which they voiced their views on several political topics, including their degree of skepticism regarding climate change. They also reported their ideological leanings.

“We found that ambient temperature significantly predicted the belief in the validity of global warming, with participants reporting greater belief on warmer days,” Risen and Critcher report. “In fact, the effect of temperature was as strong as ideology, and was not qualified by it. Thus, outside temperature influenced liberals and conservatives similarly.”

But was this really a visceral response or an intellectual exercise in which some students (admittedly not exercising sophisticated analytical skills) felt warm and jumped to the conclusion the planet is heating up? To find out, the researchers essentially repeated the experiment, but indoors.

In the second study, 84 students completed the same survey while sitting in a small heated cubicle. For half of them, the cubicle was heated with a space heater for 15 minutes before their arrival, raising the air temperature from a comfortable 73 degrees to a toasty 81 degrees.

Those eight degrees made a difference: “Participants who responded in the heated cubicle believed global warming was more of a fact than those who responded in the control cubicle,” the researchers report. Even in an indoor environment, where the temperature was controlled by humans, “people believed more in global warming when they were made hot than when they were not.”

“As people tried to imagine the hot world implied by global warming, these mental images were simulated more fluently for those who were currently warm, which led to the inference that this hot world was more likely,” the researchers conclude. As William James understood a century ago, bodily sensations, emotions, and thoughts are inextricably linked.

While the researchers don’t mention it, their work appears to reveal a tragic irony. Thanks to our use of greenhouse gas-emitting energy supplies, we now spend our summers in air-conditioned buildings and cars, which makes it harder for us to comprehend, on a visceral level, the reality of a warming world. Without such a sense, dire scenarios seem implausible and easy to dismiss.

Breaking this circle will not be easy, but this research provides scientists and educators valuable clues as to how it might be done.

“What makes future events feel more real is not necessarily well-conducted research or impressive meta-analyses that speak to the event’s likelihood of occurrence,” Risen and Critcher write, “but factors that facilitate the ability to picture what the future event would look and feel like.” They add that facilitating that sort of imaginative leap may be the key to “belief formation and acceptance.”

So if you find yourself arguing about climate change with tea partiers, you might want to meet them on their own terms and offer them some tea.

Serve it piping hot.

This article was syndicated with permission from Miller-McCune, an online and print magazine that focuses on practical options for solving serious problems, particularly if the options are backed by quality research and evidence.