New researchfrom universities in the US, Australia and the UK has tested how different pictures make people feel about whether climate change is important, and whether they can do something about it. They mostly split into three categories: pictures of climate impacts, energy futures - meaning new energy sources like solar panels - and pictures of celebrities and politicians. Images of climate impacts made people feel like climate change is important, but they also made them feel like there's not much they can do to stop it.
The researchers found that pictures of energy futures - including solar panels and energy efficiency measures - were most likely to make people feel like they could do something about climate change, because they represented ways people could act by themselves. Look at this example of successfully deployed renewable technology. How's your efficacy doing? Images of celebrities and politicians - like Richard Branson, and Al Gore - "made participants in this study feel quite strongly that climate change was unimportant".
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