If climate change doesn’t impact our immediate reality, it’s harder to prioritize how crucial fixing it is. Photograph: Dale Gerhard/AP
Extreme weather, water shortages and the spread of mosquito-borne diseases like Zika are all having very real effects on everyday realities globally, and they are all linked to a fast-heating earth system. Yet we still don’t treat climate change with the reverence we reserve for something like a terrorist attack.
Maybe the blame goes deeper, into our very natures: evolution did not design our bodies to treat climate change with urgency.
Evolutionary responses favor real-time threats, not those that take place on an extended time scale. Shrinking Arctic ice cover, erratic changes in winter snow cover or rapid shifts in heat and cold don’t provide the same sense of threat as our fear of terrorist attacks or other bodily harm.
The challenge in moving more forcefully to stop the flow of greenhouse gases is that if you have to stop and think about whether a specific action or activity is threatening, that very process engages very different parts of the human brain, and not the ones that impel us to action.
The hormones that flood through our bodies to provide increased strength and speed in anticipation of fighting or running won’t kick in when the threat is one that can only be understood through research and thought. If you want to worry whether climate change will eventually make it more difficult for humans to feed themselves, for example, you need to break out the books and study science, statistics and a lot of other disciplines. Even after you study, it is hard to share that thought with your fellow humans in a way that elevates this to an Isis-like threat.
One result: we only pay attention to climate change from time to time, and usually when it hits us in the face – Hurricane Sandy or drought if you are a farmer in California. But disaster rarely hits all humanity at the exact same time. And life goes on – our memories of tragedy fade, a survival mechanism also bequeathed us by evolution.
One time when more of us paid attention was when the countries of the world met in Paris in December to map out the next steps in the battle to contain the dangerous greenhouse gas emissions that are trapped in the atmosphere and increasing planetary heating. Daily, for a few weeks, we heard stories, opinions, data and analysis. There was a “hook” – a small, international drama taking place in France.
Now that the moment has passed, we are back to our own devices, and most of us don’t consciously connect whether gradual warming might double back to cripple human life. What if the changes make it difficult for critters and insects that play roles in food production to survive and perform their jobs? The cereal aisle in western supermarkets still offers dozens of choices. What if we don’t sense in a personal way how these changes might make us more vulnerable to opportunistic illness? We can avoid the issue unless the boss directs us to travel to Brazil and we are forced to worry about Zika.
Our difficulty looking longer-term encourages the thought that someone, somewhere is taking care of this problem for us, that there is really nothing the rest of us need do. We sit back and leave it to the experts.
The US supreme court’s recent insistence on looking through the lens of legal process – justices voted to stay Barack Obama’s carbon emissions regulations pending a challenge to them – neatly captures the fatal time factor. The court’s decision to cease implementation of the Clean Power Plan until the case is argued and decided isn’t fatal if the rule survives legal challenge. Then states will get back to work and ways will be found to reduce emissions. But the time lost in climate terms cannot be made up.
Climate change is relentless; human habit, Daniel Kahneman tells us, is oblivious. Bridging those two extremes is the central challenge of our times.
The Right needs to wake up - climate change is real, and we're causing it
There is nothing conservative about ignoring the facts. It's far past time that those on the Right, however admirable their instincts, stopped ignoring the scientific consensus
Whenever I head to the north Norfolk coast and see the wind farm offshore, visible from the Cromer pier, my heart sinks. The blinking red lights at night and the white spinning blades during the day spoil the historic view of the channel from the Victorian seafront. It was a view witnessed by a holidaying Winston Churchill at a place recommended by Austen; the clunking towers have written it off. I have not learned to love or to even silently accept the wind farms, and I cannot understand those claim that they are beautiful or elegant.
But I am persuaded that we need them. On the day that the Met Office has recognized that 2014, the warmest year on record, is attributable to man-made climate change, it’s time to put these eyesores into perspective. The results are in, and everyone from NASA to the UN agrees that there is an urgent need to change the way we behave, to prevent widespread destruction of our environment. From melting ice to strawberry crops in November, we are starting to see the early stages of a chain of events which - if not addressed adequately - will drastically alter the planet and the lives of generations to come.There are enclaves of scientific denial on the Right, like tiny pacific islands on which old Japanese men still believe they are engaged in World War Two. The odd bloody scalp, the odd skirmish does not prove that the war is ongoing. Nick Griffin, who called man made global warming ‘a hoax’ has expressed his support for UKIP, a party which has vowed to bin the Climate Change Act, and which clearly wants to attract those who think that the war is still to be fought.
Yet you don’t have to be a pro-EU fixie-cycling ethical barista of no fixed gender identity with a piercing through your nose to wake up and smell the coffee. Indeed, you should enjoy the smell of coffee whilst you can, since climate change is having a dramatic impact on the bean crop yields. Bemoaning the ban on filament light-bulbs needs to be seen in the context of widespread food shortages and significant loss of landmass. The cost of renewables to the UK needs to be set against the likely cost of famine, drought, and the expense of keeping an overpopulating planet even remotely peaceful as its food and its land diminish. It will not improve the views from the East Anglian coastline if the coastline itself is eroded.
The deniers argue that any globally coordinated response to this problem will involve ‘socialism’ and EU control, calling many exponents of green policies ‘watermelons’ for being green on the outside and red on the inside. Yet the same people will often argue that unilateral action on climate change would be an expensive waste of time whilst China is still building coal power plants. We can’t work together because it will interfere with freedom – but we can’t act alone because it’s pointless. Even more confusingly, there are too many on the Right who then have a go at private companies for getting into renewable energy. When the socialist-finder generals aren’t calling people watermelons, they are calling out the corporate greed of making a profit from involvement in green energy solutions. Governments are bashed for taking a statist approach to climate change, and corporations for a capitalist one.
There are many dreadful side effects to man-made climate change, though most of them will only be apparent – experts warn – once it is too late to counter them. In trying to act to prevent the worst of it, we are having to tear up parts of our countryside and even get our heads around splitting our rubbish into different forms of recycling. But one of the most irritating and immediate consequences has been from the deniers, particularly on the Right, who, while understandably mistrustful of ideology and consensus, have abandoned the core conservative principle of doing what works and looking at the available evidence. The same populist movements which would abolish the ‘elites’ in politics have decided that an international scientific consensus about complex, long-term changes is no match for their lived experience of yesterday's weather. Despite the best efforts of our Prime Minister in opposition, many on the right are abandoning a commitment to environmentalism as a costly and unproven expenditure.
It’s time for the doubters to surrender, and accept that there is nothing Right-wing about denying the global consensus of a scientific community. At this point too many of us on the Right echo the farcical warning of Stephen Colbert that “reality has a well-known liberal bias.” After all, it isn’t Blofeld’s SPECTRE warning us about climate change - it’s the British boffins in our own Met Office.
By Rupert Myers4:33PM GMT 04 Dec 2014
