How climate change is a distorted market

Why climate change is like bodybuilding.

Salome Balderrama
Nov 7 · Unlisted
The Hulk. Photo credit: ErikaWittlieb at Pixabay

Let’s talk about the rationale behind climate change adaptation. As we head towards a 4+°C of warming, we might as well prepare for the worst.

Why should we adapt to climate change?

Because preparation is cheaper than regret.

Because, as we can learn from the Paris floods, there is a quiet zen about executing a plan in the thick of an emergency.

And because ultimately, more lives will be spared and less damage will be suffered if we prepare ahead and adapt to our changing environment.

From individualized fear to mass panic: The neurological basis of crowd perception.

Our reptilian brain lacks the flexibility required to analyse and weigh the outcomes of multiple options, tending to be somewhat rigid and compulsive.

When we prepare, we are much more likely to make accurate, highly optimized decisions.

In an emergency, we are neurologically not able to rely on our full brain capacity.

We must plan ahead because, in an emergency, we are neurologically not able to rely on our full brain capacity.

Furthermore, in crowds, things get distorted.

When it comes to climate change, we keep getting distracted from taking real, meaningful action towards adaptation because the messaging has been distorted. Polarised.

Everyone is too busy defending whatever side of the issue they’re on. Tribalism has taken over. Sadly, at the expense of common sense.

However, we can use our biological hardwiring to our advantage.

A team of neurologists at Tilburg University in The Netherlands discovered while running a fast-event experiment that crowds individually activate the networks related to the perception, execution and integration of action and emotion.

Therefore, in an emergency, our brains are primed to work together to execute a plan. But to do that — we must have prepared a plan.

Like the bodybuilding market, climate change is a distorted market

Do you feel too skinny? Too fat? Ever tried to something about it? Maybe you know someone who suddenly decided that they wanted to go to the gym and get big.

A few years ago, the predominant belief in the bodybuilding market was “Eat as much as possible. Eat anything. Eat like a beast. Have 10 eggs for breakfast.”

Then, the predominant belief escalated to, “You need heavy supplement use.” Bodybuilders started shaking drinks with so many different supplements that they didn’t even know what they were taking. They spent thousands of dollars on these supplements.

Then the predominant belief escalated to, “You needed to lift massive weights and do very low repetitions. Get as big as possible. Bigger is better.” The result was they all wanted to look like the Hulk.

Like in the body building market, we have lost sight of our key objectives in the climate change debate.

Most bodybuilders wanted to get more attention from women. However, in the end, they ended up not getting any attention from women, and getting attention from other bodybuilders instead.

Bodybuilders lost sight of the underlying reason behind their goals. Photo: Jonnie Chambers at Dazed Digital.

This bodybuilding example is borrowed from Sam Ovens who talks about something called “distorted markets” and the madness of crowds and the fallibility of participants within them.

Distorted markets are highly emotional markets where information manipulation, misrepresentation and outright lies predominate the conversation.

Both sides of the climate change issue have become so polarised that they have distanced themselves from the truth.

Both sides believe they are speaking truth to power.

Much like in a propaganda laden environment, in distorted markets communication is designed to change the way we think or to alter our behaviour.

Like the bodybuilding market, there are countless times throughout history where people believe something to be true and it’s not.

Coinciding with the time that bodybuilders were gorging on supplements, there used to be, to simplify, two camps on climate change: “the climate believers” and “the climate deniers”.

To see both extremes of the climate change question, I like to poke around in the comments sections of blogs and YouTube.

You may have seen comments like these online. I find them fascinating because the authors of these comments believe they are speaking truth to power:

Screenshots from online comments.

“Climate denialism” and “Doomsdayers” have both gone the way of bodybuilding.

In doing so, we’ve forgotten that the underlying reason we wanted to know if climate change was real was so we could do something about it — you know, to survive.

Interestingly, Noam Chomsky has repeatedly been dismissive of “speaking truth to power”. His take is that “power knows the truth already, and is busy concealing it”.

Part of the strident distortion in the great climate change debate is that the crowds are crosstalking, each to a different “power.”

Mapping climate change on the “Chart of Truth”

It is clear — in a crowd, we lose our ability to think critically. This concept is best illustrated using Sam Oven’s “Chart of Truth.”

Sam Ovens’ “Chart of Truth”

We have now gone from debating if climate change is real (spoiler: it is), to arguing over the question “Is human activity primarily responsible for global climate change?“ In other words, is climate change anthropomorphic (=caused by humans).

Let’s graph the evolution of climate change beliefs on Sam Oven’s Chart of Truth.

Climate change beliefs plotted on Sam Ovens’ “Chart of Truth”

What can be missed in the back and forth is that the climate change debate has shifted over the past few years — in one significant way:

At some point, as as global community, the crowd thinking converged on the objective truth: climate change is real.

On our way to arguing about “why”, we crossed the line of the objective truth and agreed as a global community that climate change is happening.

Before going back to the mat to debate about its possible link to human activity, let’s not lose sight of that meaningful moment.

We have adapted before.

Go to any anthropological museum and you will learn that about 11,500 years ago, the climate changed.

I recently visited the Museum of Prehistory and Archaeology in Santander, Spain where I got a refresher on this history lesson, meandering through the long hallways of human evolution.

I left the museum frustrated with the fact that the climate change conversation is overwhelmingly dominated about saving the planet.

What about the possibility of human extinction?

Our early ancestors portrayed in wax at the Museum of Prehistory and Archaeology in Santander, Spain.

About 11,500 years ago the cold of the last Ice Age eased off and everything changed to what our climate is like today: vegetation, wildlife, landscape, and also our way of life.

With the arrival of a more temperate climate, humidity increased, sea level rose, and deciduous Atlantic forests spread.

Some species adapted, such humans, deer and ibex, but with the end of the Palaeolithic, large numbers of species became extinct. Other species, such as roe deer and wild boar even increased in numbers.

Adaptation to climate change is therefore not new to humans. We have adapted before, and now we must do it again.

In this publication, CLIMURGENCY will deep dive into the various types of adaptation available to us, including anticipatory and reactive adaptation, private and public adaptation, and autonomous and planned adaptation.

As humans, we will adapt to climate change because we must. It will be far less painful to start adaptation now. Climate action cannot be only confused with the mitigation pipedream.

True action is climate change adaptation.

CLIMURGENCY

CLIMURGENCY is committed to sharing how cities and communities are adapting to climate risks, the challenges they face, and the solutions they need.

Unlisted

Salome Balderrama

Written by

Technology translator bridging the gap between tech consumers and tech developers. Editor and Founder of CLIMURGENCY, a publication about our urgency to adapt.

CLIMURGENCY

CLIMURGENCY is committed to sharing how cities and communities are adapting to climate risks, the challenges they face, and the solutions they need.

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