Free Don't Even Think About It by George Marshall Page A

neighbors in the audience that night all had cell phones in their pockets. In retrospect, I regret not having called them up during the meeting, just to see what would happen.
    However, there is one important difference: Climate change poses a vast and unparalleled threat. Cell phone towers, though, are virtually harmless. Applying even the most cautious estimates, it would take more than seventy thousand of these towers to generate enough microwave radiation to cause any health problems. This experience found me asking why highly educated people would become so agitated about an intangible and unproven risk like cell phone radiation and yet be oblivious to the equally intangible yet far-better-proven risk of climate change.
    Paul Slovic, professor of psychology at the University of Oregon, is well positioned to answer this question. Slovic is the world’s leading expert on the social amplification of risk. He is also a modest, soft-spoken man who might be shy of such accolades. It is, though, impossible to find a single research document on the topic that is not peppered with references to his work.
    Slovic faced an uphill struggle to persuade scientists that our perception of risk is socially formed and to overcome their prejudice that, in his words, social science was soft and squishy. It was the issue of radiation—and in particular the question about why people were so much more concerned about nuclear power than they were about the dangers of medical X-rays—that launched his career in the 1970s.
    Slovic identified two main drivers of risk perception: a sense of powerlessness in the face of involuntary and catastrophic impacts, which he called dread risk, and an anxiety that comes from the uncertainty of new and unforeseeable dangers, which he called unknown risk. Dread risk is reinforced by being intergenerational and irreversible. Unknown risk is emphasized by being invisible and unprecedented. Radiation is so feared because it involves both types.
    Through social testing, Slovic mapped a wide range of threats against these criteria for dread and unknown risk. Chemicals, food additives, and microwave ovens score highly for their unknown risk. Nuclear weapons and nerve gas accidents score highly for their dread risk. The more mundane dangers of bicycle accidents, indoor smoke, alcohol, and home swimming pools have low scores by both criteria even though they are all major sources of fatalities.
    Slovic’s research explains all too well why my friends and neighbors could become so agitated about a cell phone tower. It contained a near-perfect mixture of threats: a new technology, dread risk fears of radiation, a threat to our children as they played innocently in their school playground. It also had exceptional proximity: visible, local, immediate, and with a clearly defined deadline. Finally, the coup de grâce: It had an external enemy, the faceless T-Mobile phone corporation, which had, for its own nefarious reasons, disguised this dangerous radiation-emitting tower as a flagpole.
    So I ask Slovic where climate change would sit on his scales and why it is not capable of raising the same level of concern. After all, it is also catastrophic, irreversible, new, related to technology, threatening to children, and it makes people feel powerless. Surely, I suggest, this is a royal flush of both dread and unknown risks.
    Slovic is not persuaded. He fully accepts that climate change is a massive problem. Indeed, he says he would work on it himself but he is now specializing in genocide and “only works on one impossible problem from hell at a time.”
    However, he says, it does not feel threatening, and that is the critical distinction. People’s resistance to nuclear power, toxic chemicals, or vaccination tends to emerge at the point when something is about to change: when they take their child for a vaccination or when a nuclear plant (or cell phone tower) may be placed in their neighborhood.
    But once things are