The Guardian: Why our brains are wired to ignore climate change and what to do about it [View all]

[GliderGuider]

Why our brains are wired to ignore climate change and what to do about it

The primary reason is that our innate sense of social competition has made us acutely alert to any threat posed by external enemies. In experiments, children as young as three can tell the difference between an accident and a deliberate attack. Climate change confounds this core moral formula: it is a perfect and undetectable crime everyone contributes to but for which no one has a motive.

There is no outsider to blame. We are just living our lives: driving the kids to school, heating our homes, putting food on the table. Only once we accept the threat of climate change do these neutral acts become poisoned with intention – so we readily reject that knowledge, or react to it with anger and resentment.

Even worse, climate change appears to contain a royal flush of other qualities that are notoriously hard for our brains to engage with: it requires immediate personal sacrifices now to avoid uncertain collective losses far in the future. The cognitive psychologist Daniel Kahneman, who won a Nobel prize for his studies of how irrationally we respond to such issues, sighed deeply when I asked him to assess our chances: “Sorry,” he said, I am deeply pessimistic. I see no path to success.”

So my fellow advocates for action create this enemy narrative with dramatis personae from our past struggles – corrupt politicians, malignant corporate executives, fat bankers, lazy journalists, slippery lawyers and an apathetic public. All the while, however, our opponents are mirroring these actions. During a raucous evening with members of the Texan Tea Party I was told in predictably blunt language that liberal environmentalists are the real enemy, and that we have invented this scam to extend government control. Like most conservatives, they failed to see that it is climate change itself that poses a threat to their values, freedoms and property.

This tendency to confuse the facts of climate change with the narratives constructed from them is just as common among politicians. I can safely predict that the leaders gathering in New York will stress the urgent need to control greenhouse gases but remain mute about the $1tn a year spent bringing yet more fossil fuel reserves into production. In 25 years of negotiations, no measure to control fossil fuel production has ever been discussed. It does not exist anywhere in the official narrative.

Each of our bodies contains the end results of half a million years of evolution, all of which, ironically, actively prevents us from dealing with the threats our neocortex has created in just two hundred years.