Let’s Pretend Climate Change Isn’t Real

“Yeah, but it won’t be that bad.”

“Yeah, but it won’t affect us.”

“Yeah, but we’ll adapt.”

For many people, climate change just doesn’t feel like a big issue. Unless you happen to have experienced a wildfire, a drought or a flood, it still seems quite far off. We can spend a lot of time talking through chains of cause and effect but if someone — be they a member of a public, a businessperson or a political figure — has decided for themselves that climate change isn’t a big deal, it can be pretty difficult to convince them otherwise.

So maybe a different tactic is required. What if we just pretend climate change isn’t real? What if we pretend that sea levels aren’t rising, that oceans aren’t acidifying, that global temperature isn’t creeping upwards? This might seem perverse at first — the fundamental science is, after all, unequivocally robust — but as we have seen, people often just don’t respond to problems unless they have an obvious or immediate effect. This explains a lot of life: it’s why we drink alcohol, eat cake, and spend way too much time on social media. People are great at discounting — that is to say, going for short-term gains even if they incur long-term losses. If we accept this as an unavoidable truth, the only way to prompt action is to focus on the short term. How could we make lives better — now?

Read the story from Medium by Jacob Ashton - “Let’s Pretend Climate Change Isn’t Real.”