Washington Awash  

New Scientist reports on a scenario popularised by Kim Stanley Robinson's book "Forty Signs Of Rain" - the flooding of Washington DC as a result of global warming - Antarctic bulge could flood Washington DC.

Rather than spreading out evenly across all the oceans, water from melted Antarctic ice sheets will gather around North America and the Indian Ocean. That's bad news for the US East Coast, which could bear the brunt of one of these oceanic bulges.

Many previous models of the rising sea levels due to climate change assumed that water from melted ice sheets and glaciers would simply run into the oceans and fill them uniformly. These models predict a 5-metre rise in sea levels if the West Antarctic ice sheet melts, but fail to acknowledge three important factors.

First, Jerry Mitrovica and colleagues from the University of Toronto in Canada considered the gravitational attraction of the Antarctic ice sheets on the surrounding water, which pulls it towards the South Pole. As the ice sheet melts, this bulge of water dissipates into surrounding oceans along with the meltwater. So while the sea level near Antarctica will fall, sea levels away from the South Pole will rise.

Once the ice melts, the release of pressure could also cause the Antarctic continent to rise by 100 metres. And as the weight of the ice pressing down on the continental shelf is released, the rock will spring back, displacing seawater that will also spread across the oceans.

Redistributing this mass of water could even change the axis of the Earth's spin. The team estimates that the South Pole will shift by 500 metres towards the west of Antarctica, and the North Pole will shift in the opposite direction. Since the spin of the Earth creates bulges of oceanic water in the regions between the equator and the poles, these bulges will also shift slightly with the changing axis.

The upshot is that the North American continent and the Indian Ocean will experience the greatest changes in sea level - adding 1 or 2 metres to the current estimates. Washington DC sits squarely in this area, meaning it could face a 6.3-metre sea level rise in total. California will also be in the target zone.

"Policy-makers must realise that the effects could be greater or smaller in different areas," says team member Natalya Gomez. The team have so far only considered one ice sheet, so the effects of other ice sheets across the world could also have a similar impact, she says.

New Scientist also has an interesting article on past gyrations in the climate - 1709: The year that Europe froze.

People across Europe awoke on 6 January 1709 to find the temperature had plummeted. A three-week freeze was followed by a brief thaw - and then the mercury plunged again and stayed there. From Scandinavia in the north to Italy in the south, and from Czechoslovakia in the east to the west coast of France, everything turned to ice. The sea froze. Lakes and rivers froze, and the soil froze to a depth of a metre or more. Livestock died from cold in their barns, chicken's combs froze and fell off, trees exploded and travellers froze to death on the roads. It was the coldest winter in 500 years.

IN ENGLAND they called the winter of 1709 the Great Frost. In France it entered legend as Le Grand Hiver, three months of deadly cold that ushered in a year of famine and food riots. In Scandinavia the Baltic froze so thoroughly that people could walk across the ice as late as April. In Switzerland hungry wolves crept into villages. Venetians skidded across their frozen lagoon, while off Italy's west coast, sailors aboard English men-of-war died from the cold. "I believe the Frost was greater (if not more universal also) than any other within the Memory of Man," wrote William Derham, one of England's most meticulous meteorological observers. He was right. Three hundred years on, it holds the record as the coldest European winter of the past half-millennium.

Derham was the Rector of Upminster, a short ride north-east of London. He had been checking his thermometer and barometer three times a day since 1697. Similarly dedicated observers scattered across Europe did much the same and their records tally remarkably closely. On the night of 5 January, the temperature fell dramatically and kept on falling. On 10 January, Derham logged -12 °C, the lowest temperature he had ever measured. In France, the temperature dipped lower still. In Paris, it sank to -15 °C on 14 January and stayed there for 11 days. After a brief thaw at the end of that month the cold returned with a vengeance and stayed until mid-March.

Later that year, Derham wrote a detailed account of the freeze and the destruction it caused for the Royal Society's Transactions. Fish froze in the rivers, game lay down in the fields and died, and small birds perished by the million. The loss of tender herbs and exotic fruit trees was no surprise, but even hardy native oaks and ash trees succumbed. The loss of the wheat crop was "a general calamity". England's troubles were trifling, however, compared to the suffering across the English Channel.

In France, the freeze gripped the whole country as far as the Mediterranean. Even the king and his courtiers at the sumptuous Palace of Versailles struggled to keep warm. The Duchess of Orleans wrote to her aunt in Germany: "I am sitting by a roaring fire, have a screen before the door, which is closed, so that I can sit here with a sable fur piece around my neck and my feet in a bearskin sack and I am still shivering with cold and can barely hold the pen. Never in my life have I seen a winter such as this one."

The Toronto Star has an article on "Why most of us aren't doing much about climate change – and what could change that" - The missing pieces. A major part of the answer ? Smart meters.

If you're reading this, chances are you think climate change is a problem and you want to know more about it.

But if you own two cars, blast the heat in your house and use incandescent light bulbs, George Marshall would call you a climate-change denier, perhaps even more so than those who don't believe in it.

"The people who outright say, `This thing isn't happening, this is an international conspiracy, the science is all wrong'... they at least have an internal coherence between what they say and what they do," says Marshall, the U.K.-based activist and author of Carbon Detox.

"The real denial, the definition of denial, is the disconnect between what you know and what you do. In other words, denial isn't not knowing something; denial is much more knowing something but not letting that in any way affect what you do."

By this definition, the majority of us look like a bunch of Armageddon-inviting hypocrites. And yet even after reading this article, even after a twinge of guilt, we will still leave the heat on, grab our keys, and drive an empty car to work.

Why? With environmental calamity fast approaching, why is it so hard for us to get up and do something?

This is the next generation of climate-change denial, and it's as big a problem as the first. Because if we keep it up, the road to hell really will be paved with little more than good intentions.

Don't beat yourself up just yet. Adopting pro-climate behaviours is about more than willpower. And it's about more than being informed, too.

"The assumption has always been that all that we have is an information deficit," Marshall says. "That assumption has underlined climate-change communication and the entire way we speak about it for 20 years. And still does."

We're all familiar with these campaigns: the melting glaciers, the stranded polar bears, the IPCC updates that say things are getting much, much worse.

But there's little evidence that information alone, no matter how terrifying it is, actually changes people's behaviour. In his book, Fostering Sustainable Behaviour: Community-based Social Marketing, Canadian environmental psychologist Doug McKenzie-Mohr cites numerous studies on energy-conservation campaigns, from handbooks to workshops, that show that even if people's attitudes change, their actions usually don't.

One part of the problem is external barriers. Obviously if the infrastructure is lacking, we won't change. We won't take the bus to work if there is no public transit, for instance.

But an equally important issue is our own internal struggle. Psychologists now know there are a number of tripwires in the human mind that prevent us from doing all the climate-friendly things we'd really like to do.

Social psychologists know what motivates us to change. In fact, we sound a lot like children, and spoiled ones at that.

People are programmed to want results right away – clear, immediate indications that what they're doing matters. Unfortunately, we will never see ecological "results" from our carbon-cutting efforts. The best-case scenario is that we manage to ward off the apocalypse – someday.

This is exactly why we have to change how we think and talk about climate change, says Ed Maibach, director of the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University in Virginia. "If I want you to change your behaviour, I probably should spend a lot less time scaring you about the enormity of the global problem. I should spend more time helping you think about what you as an individual can do to reduce your own personal footprint."

Not that climate-change campaigns don't do this – we often find "10 Things You Can Do" at the end of a dystopian forecast – but even then we tend to look the other way because of another human foible known as the "single action bias."

"When we do feel a need to respond, we as humans tend to want to respond by doing one thing," Maibach explains. "And that's why a lot of the climate-change communication efforts ... have suggested trivial things for people to do. You know, like `Change your light bulbs.'

"On some level it works ... but do we really want people to be doing something that's truly, in the grand scheme, meaningless, when we have every reason to believe that's all they will do if that's what we ask them to do?"

In light of this, warding off climate change may seem more daunting than ever. But there is a silver lining to our idiosyncrasies: our susceptibility to peer pressure.

Humans are social beings. Whether we admit it or not, we love to conform. Acting as part of a group makes us feel secure, and knowing how we're doing relative to others lets us take stock of ourselves. Falling behind the group: bad. Keeping up with it or ahead of it: good. We try to stay in line with what sociologists call "social norms," otherwise known as the status quo.

Wesley Schultz, a California-based environmental psychologist who specializes in social norms, has seen how powerful, cost-effective and behaviour-specific they can be.

In a study published in 2007, Schultz and his colleagues used "normative messaging" to try to get people to lower their home energy use. Simply giving households regular feedback on how they were doing relative to the rest of the group, along with a little social approval or disapproval of their consumption (in the form of happy- or angry-face emoticons) was enough to get virtually everyone to cut down on their energy use. Not because it saved them money, not because they thought they were saving the planet. but simply because they were being graded relative to their peers and given a pat on the back.

It works so well, in fact, that social psychologists are trying to pressure governments and policymakers to stop thinking about financial incentives and information campaigns and start thinking about norms. The Australian Psychological Society has already committed to compiling research on the subject to educate authorities on how to more effectively reduce carbon-emitting behaviour.

"The most important influence on our behaviour is not the media, as we think, it's actually other people," says Susie Burke, senior researcher at the APS.

Moreover, norms are not only effective by virtue of peer pressure, they also combat the powerlessness we feel when we think about climate change.

"We often feel that when we do make an effort, it's a small thing, so what's the point? But if other people see me doing it, I am therefore participating in the establishment of a social norm, which encourages and invites other people to change. It's about knowing that and trusting that that is a very powerful social force. And that encourages your own actions even when they seem so small in the midst of such major problems."

So what would a social-norm-based campaign look like? "We need smart meters," says Schultz. "We need houses, buildings, entities that can give real-time information about their consumption. And this real-time information needs to be coupled with some kind of normative element, or specific targets. So if we need to conserve five per cent, you can see `Where am I relative to that target, and where is my group, my community or my city, relative to that target?'"