How Global Warming Works
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How Global Warming Works is a website developed by Michael Ranney, a professor of
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at the
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in
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, United States. The stated goal of the website is to educate the public on the mechanisms of
global warming Present-day climate change includes both global warming—the ongoing increase in global average temperature—and its wider effects on Earth's climate system. Climate change in a broader sense also includes previous long-term changes ...
, which was motivated by research Ranney and colleagues conducted on attitudes towards and understanding of global warming.


Background

The motivation for the website came from two studies conducted by Ranney and colleagues. In the first study, they hypothesized that one of the factors explaining why fewer Americans believe in global warming than do people in other
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is that they do not understand the mechanism of global warming. To test this hypothesis, they anonymously surveyed 270 park visitors and community college students in
San Diego San Diego ( , ) is a city on the Pacific coast of Southern California, adjacent to the Mexico–United States border. With a population of over 1.4 million, it is the List of United States cities by population, eighth-most populous city in t ...
. They reported that none of the 270 participants could explain the basic mechanism of global warming even though 80% thought that global warming was real and that 77% thought that humans contributed to it. In the second study, they hypothesized that if people understood the mechanism of global warming, their understanding and acceptance of it would increase. Using a 400-word explanation of global warming they tested their hypothesis on students from the University of California, Berkeley and from the
University of Texas at Brownsville The University of Texas at Brownsville (abbreviated as UTB and formerly known as the University of Texas at Brownsville and Texas Southmost College TB/TSC was an educational institution located in Brownsville, Texas. The university was on the l ...
. The following summary of the explanation given to the students to read was provided in ''
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'': They reported that by reading a brief description of the mechanism of global warming, participants in the study increased both their understanding and acceptance of global warming. These results, which have been repeatedly replicated, motivated them to launch a new website with the aim of providing website visitors with videos of the mechanisms of global warming so that they could educate themselves on how global warming works.


Website

The website provides videos ranging from 52 seconds to under 5 minutes that describe and illustrate the mechanisms of global warming. It also provides seven statistics that have been shown by Ranney and Clark to increase global warming acceptance. Further, the website's videos have been translated into Mandarin and Germa

and transcripts of the videos in several other languages are available. Texts explaining global warming's mechanism are also available. Some of the site's information has been translated into Mandarin, and the Mandarin videos are available on Youku.


Analysis

In 2014
Dan Kahan Dan M. Kahan is the Elizabeth K. Dollard Professor of Law at Yale Law School. His professional expertise is in the fields of criminal law and evidence, and he is known for his theory of cultural cognition. Education After attending a boarding ...
was skeptical about Ranney's approach and this website's large-scale effectiveness in educating people about global warming, telling ''
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'', "I don't think it makes sense to believe that if you tell people in five-minute lectures about climate science, that it's going to solve the problem". However, Ranney and his colleagues have been assessing the videos in randomized controlled experiments and indicate that the videos (including a four-minute German video), like the 400-word mechanistic text, increase viewers' global warming acceptance—as do the aforementioned representative statistics. In addition, the website contrasts the change in Earth's temperature since 1880 with the change in the value of the
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(adjusted for inflation); this contrast also increases readers' global warming acceptance.Ranney, M. A., Munnich, E., L., & Lamprey, L., N., (in press). Increased wisdom from the ashes of ignorance and surprise: Numerically-driven inferencing, global warming, and other exemplar realms. In B. Ross (Ed.), Psychology of Learning and Motivation.


See also

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Public opinion on climate change file:20210126 Peoples' Climate Vote - Public belief in climate emergency - United Nations Development Programme.svg, upright=1.3, ''Perception of seriousness:'' Results of a survey overseen by the United Nations Development Programme on belief i ...
*
Global warming controversy There are past and present public debates over certain aspects of climate change: how much has occurred in modern times, what causes it, what its effects will be, and what action should be taken to curb it now or later, and so forth. In the sc ...


References

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External links


Official website


Climate change organizations based in the United States American environmental websites 2013 web series debuts