Posted on 09/18/2017 8:35:10 AM PDT by Oldeconomybuyer
Houston has barely begun to dry out from Hurricane Harvey, and Florida faces a massive rebuilding effort after the Irma catastrophe. These two storms, among the most powerful in American history, are typical of the extreme weather events that are likely to become more common as the planet warms.
So why isn’t the public heeding scientists and demanding climate action by politicians that could help deal with these destructive extremes? You can point fingers at the influence of fossil fuel companies, at misinformation from climate deniers and at political obstructionism, notably from a fragmented Republican party. But a much deeper force is also at work: the way our brains function.
Humans aren’t well wired to act on complex statistical risks. We care a lot more about the tangible present than the distant future. Many of us do that to the extreme — what behavioral scientists call hyperbolic discounting — which makes it particularly hard to grapple with something like climate change, where the biggest dangers are yet to come.
Our political institutions can help people focus on the long view by surveying climate impacts on a regular basis, so that each extreme storm is less a novel event and more a part of a pattern that needs sustained policy attention. One model is California’s program of localized climate assessments that inform decisions about land-use planning and development. Another is the Obama administration’s regular, nationwide assessments, which are at risk of termination under President Trump.
Our brains are unfortunately not wired to tackle problems like climate change. With some help we can build policies that enable us to do better. What the storms in the Gulf and Atlantic are reminding the public — for now, if not for long— is that the consequences of failure are big.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
David G. Victor is a professor at UC San Diego’s School of Global Policy & Strategy and codirector of the Initiative on Energy and Climate at the Brookings Institution. Nick Obradovich is a research scientist at MIT’s Media Laboratory. Dillon J. Amaya is a PhD student at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Joseph Goebbels was a German politician and Reich Minister of Propaganda of Nazi Germany.
Desperation.
We demand the weather (climate) remain static....dammit!!
Most powerful? I'd be surprised if they were even in the top 10.
More BS. Never stops.
er....”be” static!!
Brains are not wired, idiot. I know you mean that this manner of thinking is inherent in the human mind, and that there is no way to avoid it. Sorry, dummy, but that’s not how it works. There are no inherent ideas or ways of thinking in the newborn brain. What there is is the ability to learn ways of thinking.
Drop the stupid “hardwired” metaphor. Saying the word “wired” over and over again doesn’t make it true.
My brain hates NutraSweet, hates sodium saccharin, why???...Because like climate change, they’re FAKE!!!
A) "Among" is a subjective term.
B) America's history only goes back 240 years or so. How long have we been able to record the relative strength of hurricanes?
The only way to stop Goebbels Warming is for everyone who believes CO2 is a dangerous pollutant to personally stop emitting it. Once they stop exhaling, problem solved.
What? Paul Ehrlich and Rachel Carlson didn't contribute to this pile?
relative strength of hurricanes?
I would imagine hurricanes on this globe before God brought life were much stronger.
I think I see the problem. This guy has wires in his brain.
Texas hurricane history when people were around to write about them. List begins on page 8.
https://www.weather.gov/media/lch/events/txhurricanehistory.pdf
I blame Indian SUVs, Bison passing gas, burning buffalo chips, too many smoke signals.
As if we can stop the tide or the sun or hurricanes
Such hubris
Pretending to know the weather used to be a job our local news anchors performed and we got to make fun of them for being wrong about the weather they promised the next day! Only in the modern body of political advocacy science does a weather man with too many degrees get millions every year for predicting the weather thirty years from now with no more accuracy than my cat.
It's not "Hyperbolic discounting". It's "Hyperbolic Deplorables Discounting".
They have a doomsday show about how if the temperature just goes up two degrees we are all going to die.
Going up two degrees would take us back to the temperature it was when the Roman Empire was around. Humanity was flourishing.
And IIRC we would still be a degree or so below what the temperature was back when the Minoans were flourishing.
Civilization boomed then as well.
Global warming is not problem for people. We like being warm.
Now global cooling on the other hand... that is what kills us.
Both are caused by the sun increasing or decreasing it's output.
There is not a blooming thing we can do about it.
We can only apply our technology to controlling it's impact on us.
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