Freelance journalist Beth Gardiner had an editorial called We’re All Climate Change Idiotsin the New York TimesSunday Review on July 21, 2012. There are valuable insights in it, though they are not the ones Beth had in mind when she wrote it.
Climate change is staring us in the face. The science is clear, and the need to reduce planet-warming emissions has grown urgent. So why, collectively, are we doing so little about it?Yes, that’s the Big Question.
Yes, there are political and economic barriers, as well as some strong ideological opposition, to going green.
As you’ll see shortly, Beth does not explicitly refer to the economic barriers to “going green” again. That’s a glaring omission, dontcha think?
But researchers in the burgeoning field of climate psychology have identified another obstacle, one rooted in the very ways our brains work. The mental habits that help us navigate the local, practical demands of day-to-day life, they say, make it difficult to engage with the more abstract, global dangers posed by climate change.
\Robert Gifford, a psychologist at the University of Victoria in British Columbia who studies the behavioral barriers to combating climate change, calls these habits of mind “dragons of inaction.”
• We have trouble imagining a future drastically different from the present. We block out complex problems that lack simple solutions.
• We dislike delayed benefits and so are reluctant to sacrifice today for future gains.
• And we find it harder to confront problems that creep up on us than emergencies that hit quickly.“You almost couldn’t design a problem that is a worse fit with our underlying psychology,” says Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication.
Next we get an invaluable insight into opinions about climate change. This is where Beth starts to go off the rails.
You don’t need to have a PhD in psychology to make the points about how most people are ill-equipped to deal with the many-faceted AGW debate. But the economic point, important as ii is, it just a single cog in a 8-10 step or so series of claims that all have to be answered a specific way to make the AGE scare true and actionable: Like:
1) has there been material warming over some meaningful period in the past. Arguments here revolve around the reliability of the temperature record, the definition of “material” and what is a “meaningful time period.”
2) What is the cause of this warming? There seem multiple candidates
3) [How] is this warming likely to play out in the future?
4) Is said future warming bad or good?
5) What if anything can we do about it?. Here might be some debate about mitigation vs adaptation
6) What is the cost effectiveness of the various solutions?
7) How does focusing our limited resources on this problem fit in with other things we might want to do with our resources?
8) Who will bear the consequences of the proposed solutions (here the answer seems likely to be ” the poor”).
There are probably other matters I’d left out.
Maybe the reason people don’t accept climate change dogma is the realization that human beings’ ability to forecast the future, even using computes, is pretty much nil. If in 1900 someone would have said we would land on the moon in before the year 2000, no one would have listened. Speaking of 2000, how many people stocked up on supplies, build bunkers and waited for the world to collapse when computers could not handle the Y2K change? We can barely predict a week out, let along decades into the future. There are people who understand that and people who just don’t want it to be impossible to control our futures. Climate change advocates believe in control.