People don’t easily understand global warming of the planet with the accursed climate change but they fully understand and relate to the daily weather report.
People talk about the weather always.
Well… at least after the customary How do you do?
Always – just observe yourself… when you meet up with friends.
Let alone that in England people are truly obsessed with the weather like old farmers and fishermen.
Yet they never talk about Climate change.
People rally around a weather forecast, whether it involves rain or shine on the telly.
You wanna get people’s attention? Just speak about the weather forecast and the response to weather extremes. People love to hear about and even watch people responding to the weather and they get energized to participate themselves. Energized enough to be doing sandbagging in advance of the River flooding theirs or the neighbouring village or town, and helping their neighbours, or evacuating in advance of Hurricane Katrina or just circling back to help the survivors… after the fact.
Most evolutionary psychologists say that humans are genetically wired to respond to palpable threats. Threats, like a black bear or an angry dog chasing you, an elephant stampede coming at you, or a gun barrel staring at you from the hands of a punk. All of these threats are immediate and provoke a feeling of fright and an automatic response, that causes us to react and flee in panic.
Yet, as history bears me on this, it’s the abstract dangers, the ones we face in the distant future, like global warming, that are tough to wrap our heads around. Looking at a forecast map for the year 2050, even with the chance of a global average temperature increase of 11°F and a 3 feet – 13 feet rise in the global sea levels, still doesn’t set off the requisite alarm bells inside yours or most people’s heads.
That is why global warming ranked at the bottom of a list of twenty national priorities in a recent poll by the Pew Research Center. According to the Pew study, 300 million North Americans’ [excluding Canada and Mexico], collective list of concerns goes like this:
1) the economy,
2) the job situation
3) terrorism
4) Social Security
5) Education
6) Energy
7) Medicare
8) Health care
9) Deficit reduction
10) Health insurance
11) Helping the poor
12) Crime
13) Moral decline
14) The military
15) Tax cuts
16) Destruction of the Environment
16) Immigration lobbyists
17) Trade policy
18) Global warming….
As is apparent from that order, Americans aren’t concerned about global warming. Several polls have made it clear that Americans don’t get it.
Yet still a great number of American thinkers, socially conscious folks and leaders now feel that global warming is real and that it’s caused by human activities. But their concern has done little to alter how the US prioritizes the risks that global warming poses in relationship to the blown kneecap issues they have to deal with, such as the legacy of the Cheney’s bush era, stupid wars, fossil fueled islamophobia and beyond.
And that is true for the rest of the world too.
Global warming seems less urgent than those things staring us in the face.
Ultimately, it’s still last on the list of things to do.
Because global warming fails to connect with our emotions, our experiences, and our memories. For one, psychologists point to the fact that people have a “finite pool of worry.” It’s impossible to sustain concern about global warming when other worries, like an economic collapse or a home foreclosure, dive into the pool. Another problem is that of the so called ”single-action bias,” which is the human habit of taking just one action. One action at a time. Even though we know that it isn’t enough. Nowhere near enough…
And to make matters worse. It’s usually a token action that we choose to take. Yet this token action, kills the possibility to act decisively and to have any effect. Governments do that all the time too. The Politicians have even perfected this system. They only talk about what they might be able to do with a little bit more study and they count this as an action – therefore doing nothing. Absolutely nothing. And we are guilty of it also because in response to a problem or a situations where multiple solutions are required, we are doing just nothing real. We are instead short of like responding, just like offsetting a flight’s carbon footprint… Or like buying your first fluorescent light bulb or using a recycled bag once, and it seems that this reduces any feeling of urgency to act. Therefore no real action is taken to counteract the environmental degradation, stop Climate Change or protect our weather. Because our single non-action has been able to remove the feeling of worry and concern.
In essence, we aren’t fully capable of processing global warming in the traditional way. So we need to find a new way to look at it, a new way to understand it and break it down.
If you know a forest fire or a flood is coming towards your home and approaching your family – are you going to wait until the roof is burning or the water is waist-high – before you pile up and speed off in the pickup truck? Or are you going to run away with the family right after watering the roof and placing sprinklers on it, or by going to the closest riverbank and start sandbagging with all the others already there?
Global warming has been called the “perfect problem” because we don’t see it. It is perfect in the sense that it’s hard to see and it’s rather challenging to solve. It’s hard to see because its signals elude most of our evolutionary panic buttons, except our analytical minds. Climate scientists may have built models and issued dire forecasts, which include mass extinction, submerged coastlines, and chronic food and water shortages; but look outside your window, and there is no sign of a storm fitting that description. Your neighbors aren’t behaving unusually. The dogs aren’t barking crazy, breaking their chains and running for the hills either….
We’re clearly quite good at processing the risks associated with extreme weather, and this is why it’s so important for people to understand that their weather is their climate. Climate and global warming need to be built into our daily weather forecasts because by connecting climate and weather we can begin to work on our long-term memory and relate it to what’s outside our window today. If climate is impersonal statistics, weather is personal experience. We need to reconnect them.
To understand how we can link climate and weather, it helps to explain why they aren’t linked now. The short answer is time. As climate forecasts and weather forecasts have evolved, they have been separated in the public mind because weather is concerned with the immediate whereas climate is more focused on the long term. We watch a weather report on Sunday night because we want to know what to expect during the week ahead. The climate forecast, which deals in timescales of months and years, often feels too remote and intangible. That is unless insurance payouts and future risks are tabulated or the real estate is involved. We might hear that scientists think this winter will be warmer or this summer will be hotter, but we wait to pass judgment until we can experience it for ourselves. Just as our brain is hardwired to perceive threats that are most immediate to us, we are hardwired to devote more energy to caring about the weather than to caring about the climate.
This separation between weather and climate has been reinforced by the national and local news media, which regularly devote a segment to forecasting tomorrow’s weather, but rarely say anything about the climate forecast. It’s not that the information isn’t available; it’s that the way the practice has evolved, we don’t expect a climate forecast from our news outlets. As a result, we tend to separate the broad concepts of weather and climate, and we tend to see them as vastly different ideas when in reality the only big difference between them is time.
Your daily weather forecast is a function of what is happening in the atmosphere right now. We use the conditions of today’s humidity, temperature, wind speed, atmospheric pressure, etc in order to help us predict the weather of tomorrow. Meanwhile, climate forecasting gives a broader context to the weather we are currently experiencing. And that context is critical. It is also evolving as a result of greenhouse gas emissions. Think of your daily weather forecast and then average it over time and space… And that’s roughly what a climate forecast is communicating for our lives now and in the near term.
And until now, and up to Katrina and the Gulf oil spill reducing the Gulf stream; we’ve been able to view extreme weather like tropical storms, typhoons and tornadoes, and river and estuary flooding as an act of God. But science tells us that, all these extreme phenomena are due to climate change, and all such floods will happen more often, with greater severity and we need to be prepared for them. The intensity of storms in 2010 like the Snowmaggedon of Washington, and the drought interspersed with rainstorms in June and July are just the ors d’oeuvres.
The just desserts are coming later.
It sounds funny, but climate forecasting is an anti forecasting, because it is still within our common and communal power to prevent the negatives in the climate forecast from happening. It represents only one possible future that could happen if we continue to burn fossil fuels in a carbon economy and business as usual unsustainable ways. The future is ultimately in our hands. And the situation is urgent because the longer we wait, the more climate change works its way into the weather, and once it becomes part of the weather, it’s there for a good long time. What church tells you forever…. We’ll be married to it till death do us part.
We are currently in a race against our own ability to intuitively trust what science is telling us, assess the risk of global warming, and predict the future. So when we look at a climate forecast out to 2050 and see temperatures upward of 11°F warmer and sea level 3 feet higher, we need to assess the risk as well as the different solutions necessary to prevent these outcomes. The challenge is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, replace our energy infrastructure, and adapt to the warming already in the pipeline. And this is the complicated part.
By responding to and trusting the climate forecast, we will prevent it from coming true. Ninety-two percent of those surveyed in a Yale-George Mason University poll said the nation should act to reduce global warming. In other words, the overwhelming majority of Americans think they should trust the long-term forecast. But 51 percent of Americans said that although we have the ability to stop global warming, they weren’t sure if we actually would. They weren’t convinced we’d be able to see and act on the forecast of global warming until the risk was personal and the forecast was lifesaving.
This is what at the Environmental Parliament we call crossing the Berkeley line.
Most Americans also believe that ”they” and their government will not take steps to avert climate change until after it has begun to harm them personally. Unfortunately, by that point it will be too late. The climate system has time lags and reinforcing loops. And those time lags mean that the climate system doesn’t respond immediately to all the extra greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. So, by the time you see it in the weather on a daily basis, it’s too late to fix climate change. For most people, the fact that there is uncertainty surrounding the future threat of climate change means we should hold off on any expensive fixes — specifically, actions aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions from smokestacks and tailpipes — until we know more. Yet the people living on flood plains know instinctively that if you wait until the water is up to your waist, it’s already too late.
According to the comedic genius of Mark Twain: ”It’s better to build dams than to wait for the flood to come to its senses…”
It’s not like the paranoia of the ”END is NIGH” variety, but because weather forecasting and climate forecasting focus on different timescales, their goals are not the same either. Whereas weather forecasting is meant to tell you what to expect when you step outside in the morning, climate forecasting is focused on broad trends over time. Will there be a drought next summer? What is the risk of wildfire for the West? Will El Niño appear next year? What happened to the Gulf Stream? Where is the needed rain for the central wheat producing states? Will the weather be hotter in 2050?
In other words, although we can’t tell you whether it will be raining on March 1, of the year 2050, in Seattle WA; I can say with certainty that the month of March – on the average – will be far more warm and stifling, because the rainfall will be much more intense causing severe flooding of the Green River valley.
Yours
Pano
PS;
Please fetch my brolly
