“With climate, as with hockey, people seem to be waiting for the definitive A-leads-to-B line to be drawn for them.”
Climate Central’s Grants tries likening the debate over concussions among athletes to climate “denial”:
… The National Hockey League’s response to its bleak summer news [three hockey player deaths possibly linked to head injuries incurred from fighting] was more denial. NHL commissioner Gary Bettman called the research “preliminary” and defended fighting on the grounds that fans like it. To Bettman, and the team owners for whom he works, fans’ entertainment is higher on the league’s priority list than the health of its players’ brains. They don’t want to change the game and risk affecting its popularity and thus, their bottom line.
The parallels to the battleground that is climate change are startling from front to back. There is the science that people feel free to discount, even as evidence mounts pointing inexorably in one direction. There is the economic resistance to change, an unwillingness to consider a new business model. There is the inability to grasp consequences far down the road, even as cues emerge that the consequences are coming sooner than expected…
With climate, as with hockey, people seem to be waiting for the definitive A-leads-to-B line to be drawn for them…
That “A-leads-to-B-line,” Geoff is called proof-of-causation. With respect to climate, let us know when you have some — maybe it will explain why there’s been no warming over the past 15 years while atmospheric CO2 levels have increased 7-8 percent.