Posted on 10/26/2017 10:23:29 AM PDT by Oldeconomybuyer
Houston is barely beginning to dry out from Hurricane Harvey, and Florida faces a massive rebuilding effort after the Irma catastrophe.
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 put a lot more emphasis on the tangible present than the distant future. Many of us do that to the extreme — what behavioural 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 mental space is limited; we aren’t primed to focus on abstruse topics. Except for a small fraction that are highly motivated, most voters know little about the details of climate change, or the policy options relating to it. Instead, voters’ opinions about such things derive from heuristics such as political party affiliation and basic ideology.
It isn’t surprising, then, that most people don’t process information about extreme events the way scientists do.
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 gulfnews.com ...
David G. Victor is a professor at the University of California at San Diego’s School of Global Policy & Strategy and a co-director 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 from 1933 to 1945.
“You are skeptical of our political ideology? I guess your brain doesn’t work right. Don’t worry. We can fix you ...”
David: you have no provable evidence that anything you are whining and moaning about actually exists. It IS our brains: everyone is born with an innate bullshit meter. And ours get redlined when it hears crap like yours.
Cuz we’re not stupid??
I am sure a few sessions of electroshock therapy will convert the non-believers. :-)
If that doesn’t work these “brilliant scientists” can try lobotomy and see if that works.
(and they want to know why many of us hear the word “science” and start running for our lives)
There isn’t a person on earth now or forevermore who knows what the temperature of the earth should be at any point in time and space. It’s an impossibility.
400 plus scientific papers asserting that man made climate change is a myth. and not the myth that rolls in with the tide, this guy’s claims are evidence of a small mind.
Thank God we have Al Gore’s brain to do the scheming...er, I mean thinking for us.
Heh heh, because our brains have evolved to reject bulls#it!
Proclaiming it’s because our brains are limited is exactly opposite. It’s because we CAN think and recognize lies.
Another condescending lecture by climate alarmists.
And to think it took three people to write this tripe.
You can point fingers at the influence of fossil fuel companies,...
So oil companies have Hurricane generating machines?
The Trees have no problem ,their leaves are changing right on time
lol
yeah.. that’s it... it’s our BRAIN’s that are preventing us from believing your LIES !!!
lol
Right on cue. Climate change noise about the Gulf hurricanes. Crickets about those dad-blammmed Cali “wild fires.” Get in the harness and put on the yoke because humanity (specifically tax-paying Americans) is to blame for hurricanes. But...eh, never mind about “wild fires.” Just keep shoveling the Fed dollars for fires that have a high likelyhood of being started by arsonists or careless “campers.”
You have a better chance of managing the land to reduce the damage caused by wildfires than you do about hurricanes that have no proven human agency for their creation. But even there, you can manage where and how structured are built to avoid or bettter withstand them.
Send David G. Victor to live in Montana or North Dakota for a few years and send Nick Obradovich to Siberia for the same period. See if that doesn’t change their thinking on the subject. Make sure to give them a battery booster as a going away present.
At the bottom of the article there is a poll.
“Do you agree or disagree with this article?
100% disagree
We find it hard to grapple with “global warming” because the predictions keep failing to come true. The models of the AGW advocates are flawed, but instead of questioning their premises, they keep trying to adjust their models.
Actually, we are well-wired to act on complex statistical "whatever" (why did he say "risks"?--it is not in the risk domain at all). We are well-wired to simplify complex statistics, but we are also wired to reject statistics (such as Louis Farrakhan's "19" mazes) when they are being used to obscure and obfuscate the truth in favor of some sophistry.
So I would ask: what statistics? How were the data gathered, where, and for how long? What is the margin of error or deviation? Were the data interpolated through observation, or via computer model (garbage in, garbage out)?
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