A Piha resident salvages personal belongings from his home after being cut off by Gabrielle's floodwaters. Photo / George Heard
Auckland’s wettest day, New Zealand’s most damaging cyclone and a fresh bout of severe weather that doused Mangawhai with nearly 400mm of rainfall in less than half a day.
Given all of these events will bear a climate change handprint, it’s little surprise that search trends have shown spikes of people Googling about it.
Our summer of storms has similarly triggered a flurry of climate coverage in the media, while also bringing the crisis, and all of the enormous questions it poses, into sharper political focus ahead of the election.
For climate change psychologists who’ve long been tracking Kiwis’ perceptions, there’s plenty to ponder.
Has the ground of public consciousness – and with it, our expectations of lawmakers and polluters - just dramatically shifted?
Will this really bring the transformative change that the Christchurch Earthquake did for our society?
Or, does our climate concern wane after every extreme event, regardless of the rainfall records they smash, to the point that we’re normalising our largest existential threat?
The bad news, the researchers say, is yes, we’re readily prone to care less, the further we move from disastrous events.
And yes, we’re notoriously adept at normalising risks like climate change, even when they’re right in front of us – just take Covid-19 and the 21 new deaths it just contributed to in one week.
The good news, at least, is that Kiwis do at least have high awareness about climate change, and its potential to affect us all personally.
IAG’s latest annual survey indicated three quarters of us felt we were seeing more frequent floods – up from 57 per cent only five years ago – while eight in 10 saw climate change as an issue personally important.
While the havoc of the last two months may have prompted Climate Change Minister James Shaw to press officials on whether our sluggish adaptation efforts can be sped up, IAG’s polling had already been showing rising expectations for the Government to go harder.
More Kiwis were looking to the Government for direction, it found, and also to councils, to invest in smarter infrastructure and prevent development in risky places.
Another recent Herald poll found nearly 60 per cent of Kiwis thought the country should take stronger action – with around a quarter “strongly” agreeing New Zealand should be bolder.
Although younger people were more likely than older Kiwis to back stronger action, that sentiment fell generally evenly across age groups.
Political scientists remind us that we’re fortunate not to live in a political environment like the US - where climate change is a much more polarised issue - and that our government and opposition are keen for a bipartisan approach to complex headaches like managed retreat.
To Victoria University’s Professor Marc Wilson, there was little doubt Kiwis cared much more today than they did even 10 years ago.
Back then, data gleaned from the longitudinal NZ Attitudes and Values Study (NZAVS) suggested just over half of people were at least a little worried about climate change.
“Last year, that spiked to almost two in three of the 30,000 folks who took part,” Wilson said.
“That is a big jump.”
This might be unsurprising if we consider that seven of the eight warmest years on Niwa’s books have all occurred since 2013 – or that insurers just chalked up another record for year for extreme weather claims, even before the billions of dollars of fresh damage this summer has wrought.
In line with IAG’s work, NZAVS data also reflected small but incremental increases in Kiwis’ certainty about anthropogenic climate change.
Hearteningly, those who still denied that climate change was happening – and that it was being driven by our own activities – were today a small minority.
As at 2020, NZAVS research found just two per cent of participants disagreed that climate change was real, with another 6 per cent “doubtful”.
While the proportion of “deeply concerned” people appeared to have risen over the 2010s, Wilson said it appeared to have plateaued since 2020, perhaps because of the pandemic.
Did he feel this summer would reboot the trend?
That wasn’t so straightforward.
“We know several things: first, peoples’ experience of the weather - as in what they feel outside - is important for their attitudes to the bigger picture issue of climate,” Wilson explained.
“This, of course, is hugely subjective, insensitive - can you really tell a difference either way of 1C? - and dependent on your context.”
In general, people tended to be more sensitive to clear patterns – such as what we’ve seen over the past few weeks – than one-off occurrences.
Still, research also suggested that events as catastrophic as Gabrielle could act like a cold slap to the face, even if the effect was temporary.
Speaking to the Herald last week, climate change economist Professor Ilan Noy cited one former Chicago mayor’s famous remark of not letting “a serious disaster go to waste”.
“It sounds cynical, but after a disaster, there’s a short window of time when people understand and accept that we need to engage in a paradigm shift and that business-as-usual is no longer a legitimate choice,” Noy said.
“That window is already starting to slowly shut down.”
Wilson offered a few reasons for that, which were well-known in psychology.
“One is that the emotional intensity of an experience dims over time - it’s called Fading Affect Bias,” he said.
“For some, maybe many, and definitely not all folks, we’ll remember our house flooding as bad, but it’ll lose the acuteness of it.”
University of Auckland psychologist Professor Niki Harre added: “Yes, recent events are likely to be at the forefront of our attention.
“Part of this is because they are featured in the media and everyone is talking about them: as time passes, the widespread conversation wanes and so for most people their attention to the issue wanes.”
“Of course, for people with long-term damage from weather events, this is not the case.
“But it is like any loss, over time the outpouring of support reduces as for other people, different issues are now at the forefront of their attention.”
Humans also tended to demonstrate certain biases in memory.
“Think of people you know who say ‘but it was always warm when I was a kid’. Was it really, though?” Wilson said.
“We have pretty good data that shows that New Zealand has been notably and more consistently warmer in recent years than it was 20 or 30 years ago, but it’s hard to convince people that their memories are fallible or biased.”
And then, of course, we were also prone to becoming “habituated” to climate-driven events, just as the flawed yet effective frog-in-the-boiling-pot metaphor is regularly used to highlight.
One much-cited US study sampled more than two billion geolocated tweets to assess what kinds of temperatures generated the most posts about weather.
They found that people often tweeted when temperatures were unusual for a particular place and time of year — a particularly warm March or unexpectedly freezing winter, for instance.
However, if the same weather persisted year after year, it generated less comment on Twitter, indicating that people began to view it as normal in a relatively short amount of time.
“If once-in-10-year storms happen every year it changes the baseline and adds to the risk that people become fatalistic,” Wilson said.
“It’s going to happen, and it feels like we can’t do much, so why bother?”
That’s something that’s been on the minds of Niwa scientists as they’ve updated New Zealand’s 30-year climate baseline – or “normal” - to reflect what now constituted “average” or “above average” temperatures in our already warmed world.
As things stood, seeing a month of “below average” temperatures relative to even our former 1981-2010 baseline was increasingly unlikely: it’s been more than six years since that happened.
In the US, climate agencies had addressed the issue by presenting to the public two baselines: one showing how today’s temperatures starkly contrasted with historical averages.
While such efforts were unlikely to stop us normalising climate change, Harre said there was still an expectation that ongoing threats were worthy of ongoing attention.
“Think, for example, of building standards designed to reduce earthquake risk,” she said.
“These are likely to appear more sensible to the average person as a result of the Christchurch earthquakes.”
As a result of being battered by extreme weather, she suspected Kiwis – especially in our drenched north and east – would now be more open to policy changes needed to tackle the crisis.
“I think many people will want, or at least accept, a more proactive government as a result of the recent weather events.”
Whether they’d also motivate people to take their own steps was trickier, Harre said, noting environmentalists’ scepticism about framing the crisis as one to be overcome with individual effort instead of large-scale action.
Wilson, for his part, expected to see greater individual commitment to tackling climate change, if not while Gabrielle was still fresh in our minds.
As Noy suggested, Wilson also saw a useful window of public support for lawmakers to act.
“The reality is that we need both individual action, and institutional action, and individuals can actually drive institutional action through calling for action and for voting in ways that bring about the changes they want made.”
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