When I grew up I used to have long and interesting conversations with the father of friend of mine who was a scientist, albeit not a strict climate scientist. He warned me that my generation and future generations would probably be faced with the enormous consequences of man-caused greenhouse gas emissions.
The discussions in the public domain are often far removed from the debate in the scientific domain, where this is settled science..
The principle of greenhouse gases and the effects of man unearthing them and throwing them as waste inside the atmosphere were already voiced at the end of the 19th century.
I have always found it a subject that was difficult to broach and until today many people seem to avoid thinking about it or pretend it isn't there, or that it will go away by itself (apart from vested interests that deliberately distort facts and information)
I always wondered why that was. I found an interesting video on this subject, in which Dan Miller cites the difference in threat indicators. He makes the following observations and uses the metaphor of the threat of a lion:
We respond to threats that are: | Climate Change is: | Analogy |
Visible | Invisible | The lion is there |
With historical precedent | Unprecedented | The lion ate your brother last week, so now you know to watch out for lions |
Immediate | Drawn Out | The lion is there, you have to act right now |
Have direct personal impacts | Unpredictable and Indirect Impacts | The lion is coming after you |
Simple causality | Complex causality | The lion is going to eat you and you are going to be dead |
Caused by an enemy | Caused by all of us | The lion is the enemy |
It also discusses some of the denial strategies:
We think of it as environmental | It is an environmental problem, like WW II was solely an environmental problem (not) |
We make it impolite to talk about it | Society sets it outside the "norms of attention" |
We wait for someone else to act first | The "passive bystander effect" |
Of course it is also too big of a problem on an individual scale and it makes us feel bad, so the human reaction is to rationalize it away...
A simple and smart way to fix climate change | Dan Miller