Switzerland is a country where global warming is visibly and dramatically impacting on the landscape. But how does the experience of seeing these changes affect the tourists who flock to Switzerland every year?
The Rhône Glacier is perhaps the most prominent example of melting glaciers in Europe, and in the last few decades it’s been retreating by over 30 meters a year. When I visited this summer, Switzerland had just experienced its second warmest June on record.
What remains of the Rhône glacier is still awe-inspiring, but its rapid melting is very evident. Even those who had visited the glacier in the previous year were telling me how they could notice the difference. The loss of this glacier is threatening to deprive people and animals of an important source of fresh water. It will drive away the birds and the plants that thrive on it. And of course, we know the melting of glacier is contributing to sea rise. So, in all these different ways, this might be one of the most unmissable symbols in Europe of how we are destabilizing our climate. You might think of it as a literally massive piece of evidence pointing to the need for urgent climate action. Well, you might think that, but most of the visitors I talked to were fairly unmoved by what they saw.
Tamara, from Freeburg in Switzerland, told me “I think if even if we wouldn’t have climate change, the Glacier would disappear. Okay, not as fast as it does, but it would still disappear.”
Martin from Selby, in North Yorkshire (UK), was driving through the area principally because he enjoyed driving his Porsche on Switzerland’s excellent roads. When I asked him whether he was concerned about the glacier’s retreat. He commented “It’s worrying and it’s sad, but I don’t know what we can do about it. It’s a joint global effort it to prevent global warming – and everybody’s got their own needs and wants for travel and electricity and so on.”
Martin was travelling with Agnieszka, originally from Poland, and she found the glacier amazing but, when I asked about the glacier disappearing, she told me “I think it’s just nature. It’s how it needs to be. Thirty years ago it was different. Now it’s different. Maybe after 100 years it’ll be again like it was before – you never know. So I think it’s just a nature thing and we just need to leave it for nature.”
These weren’t quite the responses what I’d expected! But, on reflection, it seems each of these responses reflects how ambiguity can encourage us to disengage with the facts. Tamara, for example, suggested it was going to melt anyway. Well, yes, it’s true that on average the glacier has been melting over the last few thousand years, but nothing like the speed it is now – and with the possibility of all glaciers disappearing from Europe by the end of this century, the Rhone Glacier hasn’t been this size since around the dawn of civilization in Europe, which perhaps should remind us of how civilization depends on climate. Martin seemed to suggest there was nothing we can do as individuals – we’re powerless. The seed of ambiguity here is that yes – each of us knows we can’t solve the global climate crisis on our own. But throughout the history of civilization, we’ve had to learn to work together at increasing scale. We’ve gone from small hunter gatherer tribes to urban and then national populations by learning to communicate common goals across ever larger populations. The idea of working together globally is daunting, but whoever we are, each of us also has a potential individual role to play in adopting the attitudes and behaviors needed for success. Everyone can be doing something more. Agnieszka said it was just nature. It melted before and came back. Maybe that will happen again. Well, yes, it’s true that during the so-called “little ice age” in Europe a few hundred years ago, the Rhone Glacier advanced. But I also tried to make the point that this so-called Little Ice age wasn’t a global ice age. It was more of a local event – unlike a global temperature change, which is what’s mostly driving glacial shrinkage. So, to be clear, there’s no chance of an ice age appearing on the horizon to bring back the world’s glacier once they’ve gone. But the trouble is that these seeds of ambiguity can impact us in ways that far outweigh their significance in fact. Some politicians even appear to be purposely sowing ambiguity when arguing we don’t need to make changes we might find inconvenient just for the sake of the environment. And that’s proving an attractive idea for many voters.
So why is ambiguity so toxic to rational thinking? Much of what we know about how the brain deals with the unknowns in life comes from experiments around betting with money. These experiments have revealed a difference in our response to uncertainty (where we have some awareness of the probabilities involved) and ambiguity (where we know little about the chances of being right or wrong). Uncertainty in many situations (like spinning a wheel of fortune and other games of chance where we can see the odds) actually increases reward signals in our brain. Here, the unknowns involved make us want to engage more. But we do like to have a rough idea of the odds – otherwise the situation can make us want to disengage. And that’s true even if the odds can’t help us win – showing just how much this aversion to ambiguity can bias our reasoning. This is called the Ellsberg paradox. Ellsberg asked people to play one of two games. In the first, they had to guess whether the color of a ball would be red or black, when it was drawn from a mixture containing an equal number of both types – so 50:50 odds. Or, they could guess the color drawn from an unknown mixture of red and black balls. The chances of winning (based on what’s known) are essentially the same. Yet people preferred the first situation, i.e. the less ambiguous one. We have ambiguity aversion.
When in 2005, scientists in California looked at the brain’s response to ambiguity, they found activation in the amygdala often associated with fear and anxiety. When the unknowns involved disagreement rather than just lack of information, scientists have found that we respond with an even stronger aversive response. So once the facts become even a little more complex and less clear cut, this aversive response can make us want to look away, to move on, disengage and ignore.
Perhaps that’s why we might not expect your average tourist to connect a melting glacier to their everyday decisions. But that raises the question of what so-called “last chance tourism” is really about. Can it be prompted by genuine concern for the environment, and/or perhaps even shift people’s attitudes in a more pro-environmental direction? Or is it just a selfish desire to tick a box on an increasingly exclusive bucket list? In the next blog entry (and associated podcast), we’ll be staying in Switzerland to meet Dr. Emmanuel Salim, who’s been studying Last Chance Tourism and might throw some light on these questions.