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Friday, September 06, 2013

Climate Change Update

There have been several interesting pieces about climate change over the last few weeks. The first is the draft summary of the next United Nations report on climate change which states with a higher level of certainty the effects that human beings are having on the rise global temperature. They also address the adolescent "n'yah n'yah" of the recent slowdown of warming which is interesting.

NASA has a nice list up of why climate change is settled science, thus torpedoing the notion that there is conflict not consensus in the scientific community.

And Time magazine put a piece last month about why more people aren't acting on climate change even though more people accept that the earth is warming.

For some, the answer lies in cognitive science. Daniel Gilbert, a professor of psychology at Harvard, has written about why our inability to deal with climate change is due in part to the way our mind is wired. Gilbert describes four key reasons ranging from the fact that global warming doesn’t take a human form — making it difficult for us to think of it as an enemy — to our brains’ failure to accurately perceive gradual change as opposed to rapid shifts. Climate change has occurred slowly enough for our minds to normalize it, which is precisely what makes it a deadly threat, as Gilbert writes, “because it fails to trip the brain’s alarm, leaving us soundly asleep in a burning bed.” 

Recalling our times as cavemen, most people don't act until they are on fire. Essentially, it needs to be personal.

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