Why We Fail to Realize the Consequences of Climate Change
We all know how detrimental climate change is to the human population and how it will affect everyone without exception if no action is taken today. The latest United Nations report on climate change suggests that there could be some significant consequences in the next 25 years if the nations of the world don’t take some serious action soon.
Unless, of course, you are a skeptik and you think there is a small chance of climate change becoming a real problem that will affect humanity. Even in this case, there is still a chance that it will affect you or your family in some way. Even if there is a 10% chance of climate change affecting humanity, no one is ready to take that chance, right?
“Climate change might be a domain where that is a really dangerous thing because our brains really are not well set up to intuit the consequences of risks that are unfolding on a planetary level.”
Still, many people don’t seem to realize the gravity of the issue and care much more about immediate threats instead. Imagine you are swimming in the sea and you are scared of getting bit by a shark, which is an extremely small chance, but you don't seem to care about ocean warming, which is a much more real and significant threat. In fact, the last 10 years were the ocean’s warmest decade since at least the 1800s. However, climate change doesn't represent an immediate threat, so people are not usually motivated to act and do something about it. We tend to overvalue benefits in the short term relative to benefits in the long term. We value something we can immediately achieve now over a long-term benefit. People overeat in the present, despite the problems that obesity can cause in the future. This concept of temporal discounting is hardly exclusive to climate change.
The issue with climate change is that it is often viewed as a problem that will happen in the future rather than a pressing issue in the present. This creates a sense of uncertainty for many people, as they may not be able to see the immediate effects of their actions or the severity of the problem in their day-to-day lives. As a result, many individuals may opt to focus on things that bring them happiness in the moment rather than considering how their choices may impact them and others in the long run. In the case of climate change, some people don’t believe that human activity has a significant impact on the climate and argue that the dire consequences predicted by some experts may not happen.
Lastly, climate change represents such a distant concept, both physically and in terms of time, that people tend to overlook its consequences. Physical distance from the immediate consequences of climate change allows people to underestimate the effect climate change has on the world. When it comes to weather disasters that are probably linked to climate change, such as wildfires and extreme storms, they often happen in places where not many people live. This means that most of us don’t have to face the nitty-gritty details of climate change, and instead, we tend to see it as an abstract concept. Unfortunately, abstract ideas don’t motivate us to take action as much as concrete examples do. So, while we might understand that climate change is a problem, we might not be moved to do much about it until we see its real-world effects up close. Temporal distance leads people to selfishly assume that they will not live to see the world crumble because of climate change.
If we were to do something about climate change, we would need to start with ourselves. Preventing climate change is not something that can be done immediately, and it requires everyone to take even the smallest action. We need to either accept our hypocrisy and selfishness and learn to live with it or take action now so the future of humanity doesn’t suffer.
If you want to learn more about this topic (🌱🌿🌳),
