Walking in the cool breeze of November in 2019, I realized that the leaves finally gave their farewell through their elegant pathway falling to the ground, at least one month later than usual... Witnessing this phenomenon, I started to recall the weather changes and temperature rise over these years. Until now, I have experienced the haze and other extreme weather in China. The reality we have to face is that the irregularity in climate will emerge more frequently later on... I can’t stop asking myself: Is this caused by global warming? Similar situations did happen throughout history, such as the "global warming" in the Cretaceous period according to National Geographic. However, those changes in history had “occurred slowly, over thousand years”, while the “climate change” we’re facing today occurred only within decades (National Geographic n.p.).

Global warming is the greatest crisis we’ve faced so far. Being the most indirect and invisible challenge, it surely has a detrimental impact on us. When browsing the policies different countries cope with climate change, it is obvious that technological applications were given with full emphasis. It is undeniable that those technologies and mechanisms played a positive role in recent years. However, without arousing people’s awareness, it is impossible to carry out the policy of global warming reduction. According to psychology professor Daniel Gilbert from Harvard,?“We respond to the threats that have four properties that are intentional, immoral, imminent and, instantaneous. Threats that have these four features trigger our brains into alarm system, and they spot on the actions that don’t have them. Global warming has none of these properties”. Therefore, we should find some educational measures to raise people’s environmental awareness on global warming.

First of all, the life threat of global warming should be included in student textbooks from primary school, which makes it psychologically imminent because people always regard health and safety as the most important thing. According to WHO, the constant warming of 0.85oC during the last 130 years gave rise to extreme high air temperatures that contribute directly to deaths from cardiovascular and respiratory disease, causing more than 70,000 Europeans to die in 2003. Not only did such heat seriously harm our wellbeing, but the consequent natural disasters and the disease infections also bring about lots of damage to our societal system (WHO). So, it matters for students to realize the threat of global warming from an early age in order that they can have a positive mindset.

What’s more, public media is an effective way to educate people to pay more attention on climate change. According to David Giles, author of Media Psychology, media is a great tool to encourage prosocial behavior. Government should invest more in the PSAs (Public Service Advertisement) as the approach of emotional touch through verbal broadcast and video performance to make people feel immoral about the environmental destructions even they unintentionally made. Besides PSAs, as Russian scholar Tina Kubrak suggested that, “cinema is a means of individual and social transformation”, and “Cinema can change people’s opinions on specific issues without affecting more stable constructs”. Also, she claimed that such an art form is able to change young people’s biased attitudes in a positive way (Kubrak). By the means with?relative psychological concepts, the inspiration on people’s conscience is much stronger than those story-less scientific preaching and cold data.

Furthermore, high tech could play a creative role in publicizing the crisis of global warming. As Harvard psychology professor, Daniel Gilbert, mentioned before, we can virtually?expose people to threats that are intentional, immoral, imminent and, instantaneous so that they will realize how severe global warming is. Online games or the new term “metaverse” could be very helpful and feasible. It’s much easier to imitate the disaster in the metaverse. Government should encourage and reward such kind of game creation. As a policy to be implemented, game development should focus more on creating such VR scenario based on the cruel reality instead of developing disjointed words.

From seeing the late arrival of the falling leaves to understanding the importance of environmental education, it is clear that we should solve the problem by changing people’s mindset. Considering the psychological factors like imminent, immoral, and immediate, we should conduct people to take a green path so that the next autumn could arrive on time again.

Work Cited

Boudreau, etal. “Earth’s Changing Climate.”?National Geographic, 2020, https://www.nationalgeographic.org/article/earths-changing-climate/.

“Climate change and health.”?WHO, 2018, https://www.who.int/news-room/fact- sheets/detail/climate-change-and-health.

Kubrak, Tina. “Impact of Films: Changes in Young People’s Attitudes after Watching a Movie.”?MDPI, 2020, https://www.mdpi.com/2076-328X/10/5/86.

Giles, David.?Psychology of the Media. Red Globe Press, 2010.

Van Lange, etal. “Climate Change: What Psychology Can Offer in Terms of Insights and Solutions.”?SAGE journals, 2018, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0963721417753945.