Why We Fail to Notice Climate Change — and What a Simple Trick Can Fix

Science News journalist Sujata Gupta raises a deceptively simple but deeply important question in her March 2026 column: why do people fail to register the reality of climate change, even when it is unfolding around them?

Drawing on research published in Nature Human Behaviour (July 2025) by Grace Liu of Carnegie Mellon University and colleagues, Gupta explores what the researchers call the "binary climate effect." The core finding is striking: people pay significantly more attention to climate data when it is presented in black-and-white terms — did the lake freeze this year or not? — rather than as gradual temperature curves. In experiments with hundreds of participants, those shown binary freeze/no-freeze data rated the impact of climate change notably higher than those shown continuous temperature graphs. The framing, it turns out, matters enormously.

Part of the explanation lies in what researchers describe as a "boiling frog effect." A 2019 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that people's mental baseline for "normal" temperatures shifts every few years, meaning that even rapid warming can go psychologically unnoticed. We essentially gaslight ourselves, as one UCLA scientist quoted in the piece puts it, into thinking nothing alarming is happening.

This normalisation compounds across generations. Children who have never witnessed a frozen lake in winter do not experience its absence as a loss. What was once remarkable becomes simply the world as it is.

Gupta also draws on the perspective of psychologist Jeremy Shapiro, who notes that binary thinking — whilst generally considered a cognitive distortion in therapy — is actually how human minds are wired to save energy. Our brains are, in his phrase, "cognitive misers." Climate communicators might therefore do better to work with this tendency rather than against it, using concrete, either/or signals (frozen or not frozen; snow or no snow) to cut through the noise of abstract datasets.

At Green Cross, we find this research particularly relevant. Environmental communication has long wrestled with the challenge of making systemic, slow-moving change feel urgent and personal. The insight here is not to oversimplify science, but to anchor it in tangible, lived realities — the kind of detail that people can actually feel and remember.

The article also touches on a broader cultural dimension: research from western Kenya, cited by anthropologist Julian Sommerschuh of the University of Hamburg, suggests that communities who discuss concrete, local responses to climate threats — planting trees, protecting soil — maintain a sense of hope and agency that is largely absent in societies overwhelmed by the scale of global data.

This is a point Green Cross takes seriously. Action follows understanding, and understanding follows perception. If binary framing helps people see what is already happening, it may be a valuable tool in the communicator's kit — provided it is always accompanied by the full complexity of the evidence.

We recommend reading the original article in full: "Why we fail to notice climate change" by Sujata Gupta Science News, 13 March 2026 sciencenews.org/article/climate-change-binary-frozen-weather

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