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By Susan C. Price
[Questions are followed by answers and then, inevitably by ADVICE...you DID expect that...didn’t you?]
Why can’t more people believe in global warming, when it is so obvious to anyone with any intelligence? –Deborah
Truly a puzzlement (as the King says in “The King and I”). Fast thoughts:
- They are frightened at the possibilities. They fear change (“What if I couldn’t drive where and how I need to?) They are not ready to recycle every item and to work for political figures who will take action.
- They don’t understand science and scientific proof. (Ever wonder about how our schools are doing?)
- They don’t believe it because a big change is not (yet) happening in front of their eyeballs, in their life (like snow in their desert town). Just like politics, it’s local. Most folks are too busy dealing with their daily lives to look up and around at the world. (Maybe that’s a good thing. Sometimes that larger view is...so overwhelming as to render one...paralyzed.)
So, then I consulted the Oracle (Internet). It frightened me that the first four site references to “Why don’t people believe in Global Warming?” referred to Rush Limbaugh...Oh dear, I tend (mild word) to disagree with him. So, just like all the other people I disparage, who won’t listen to what they disagree with, I avoided those sites, and went for a Science site, which did offer some areas of scientific challenge: howstuffworks.com.
Personally, I expect that some sort of “tipping point” has already been reached, or soon will be. And that the major, painful, human cost will be stunning.
Also, I suspect that the immediate cause will be something that almost no one saw coming. It won’t be gasoline use, fracking, or the bees. (Bee colony collapse does not seem to be connected to global warming, but it does seem to be connected to stuff that humans have created...ahh darn...again.)
[We would really like more questions to answer, so send ’em in….]
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Copyright © 2013 by Susan C. Price
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The one I like: "it is the sign that end of time is at hand". That's a big one down South. They all pray for it to come in their life time so they will not die, but be taken up on wings of eagles. Hard to talk science with that.
ReplyDeleteI wonder if the problem lies in the tendency I see in a lot of people to only believe what fits with what the authority figures of their childhood told them was true. Which in most cases was church and school.
ReplyDeleteIf you are tired from a long hard day, trying to take in new, complex, disputed ideas seems easier if you can fall back on the "truths" given to you when you were a kid. Simple "black and white" answers, which "everybody knows" and which underlie the "common sense", that make your world work. Or at least that's how it seems. Problem is, much of that information has become out dated, was too simplified in the first place, and sometimes had a hidden agenda.
Further, if I can judge by my schooling, unless you were expected to go to college you didn't get much education in science or scientific methods in the first place. If they expected that your education would end in High School, the emphasis was on the practical- what could be used on the farm, or in the shop or business.
So trying to sort out the competing claims of whatever "expert" was just on TV is probably beyond you, unless one of your children has gotten the science bug and can help untangle the "tangled web" that media creates trying to "maintain objectivity".
Worse yet, I fear that present education promotes even less of an understanding of the complexity of the science and politics of climate change. The continuing emphasis on test scores leaves little room for extended examination and exploration, which is how thinking and understanding is trained into young people.
Will the last person leaving the Twenty First Century please shut off the air conditioning and the lights...
An important cause of climate doubt is deliberate disinformation. The likes of the Koch brothers and the CEO of Exxon/Mobil have been donating big bucks to right wing think tanks for more than twenty years, specifically to help them lie to us about climate change. There was a paper out of UC San Francisco a few years back that followed the money in detail. For tens of millions, it worked. I actually know intelligent people who have been suckered, and I haven't been able to convince them that they've been lied to.
ReplyDeleteWe've heard so much about big money's clout with political advertising and other misinformation lately, I've started to feel that I may have been overly critical of "stupid people" continuing to vote for the wrong candidates, etc.—especially when even "intelligent people" have been suckered and, probably, I've been suckered some myself. I probably "know" a number of facts-that-aren't because I've not yet examined the reasons I believe them....
ReplyDeleteIt might be fun for us to try to identify more of these facts-that-aren't. Anyone want to do an article on that theme?