Most discussions on climate change ignore these 10 basic facts about human nature [View all]

[damnedifIknow]

1) We are overly optimistic about the future — our future, that is

Neuroscientist Tali Sharot has observed that when newlyweds are asked about their chances of getting divorced, they tend to say zero, despite the widely known fact that the odds are 50–50. We instinctively overestimate the probability of positive events and underestimate the probability of negative events in our own lives she writes in The Optimism Bias, for two reasons: we think we have more control over our lives than we actually do, and we tend to see ourselves as better than average.

Applied to climate change, this means that I might think that you­ — and surely those poor Pacific Islanders — might be negatively affected, but I’ll be okay. The problem, of course, is that this reflects a bias grounded in delusion.

2) We can be blasé about the most important issues in the world because the global perspective is way beyond ordinary human scale

"Trying to convince people of the magnitude of the climate problem through large-scale statistics is essentially useless," says Scott Huettel, chair of the department of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University. The iconic global warming image of the polar bear on the iceberg is evocative precisely because it is one polar bear. Thousands of polar bears on a glacier that is receding would be irrelevant. Our brains cannot process it."

Put another way, climate change seems like an abstraction because it is so much bigger than us. Humans relate to human-sized stories — the kind that speak to a family living in a home like ours, having dreams and struggles like ours, and maybe discovering one day that their home is on a map of places expected to soon be underwater."

More: http://www.vox.com/2015/6/14/8767823/psychology-global-warming