The wickedest of all problems - IX

One major problem in dealing with climate change is the difficulty human brains have in thinking about the many scales of time involved. In The Climate of History in a Planetary Age, Dipesh Chakrabarty argues that humans must combine two perspectives that involve vastly different time scales - one pertaining to "the planet” and the other to "the globe”. We need to look at humans today from both of these perspectives at once if you want to understand the planetary environmental problems humans face today, 

"The planet” is the Earth system – the earth as a planet in which biological and geological processes connect to create a “system”-like entity that has kept complex multi-cellular life going for more than half a billion years. "The globe” is what humans have created – it refers to the technological connectivity that binds this world together to make human flourishing possible on a very large scale. Global processes – the growth of European empires, global technologies, and a world market - have started impacting the domain of the planetary (the workings of the Earth system).

The scientific literature on climate change brings to our attention the role played by nonhuman creatures (microbes, fungi, planktons, plants) and entities (glaciers, forests, deep seas, oceanic currents, the Siberian permafrost, polar ice caps) in keeping the earth habitable for complex forms of life. We don’t have to forget human desires and priorities but have reached a position in history where we also must become more aware of how this planet “works,” what makes it a life-bearing planet and how life has, in turn, changed this planet.

The global COVID problem can be thought of as the “planetary” clashing with the “global”. Humans are the vector for spreading SARS-COV-2 because we live in congested cities, and are extremely mobile in search of profit and livelihood. That’s global history. But our bodies have also become evolutionary pathways for the virus, and that is an event in the history of biological life on the planet. This virus has been living in the guts of bats for millions of years. Its history belongs to deep, planetary history. 

Elizabeth Colbert calls the current rapid disappearance of species The Sixth Extinction. Far worse extinctions have happened in the past and the earth has recovered. But recovery and restabilisation occur at planetary, not human, time scales — that is, millions of years after the disturbing event. At this scale, we are powerless to harm; the planet will take care of itself. Our planet is not fragile at its own time scale but this time scale is irrelevant to humans in normal times.

The lifetime of fossil fuel CO2 in the atmosphere is a few centuries, plus 25 percent that lasts essentially forever. Around 56 per cent of all the CO2 that humans have liberated by burning fossil fuel is still aloft. The consequences we suffer at any one point in time are the result of past emissions. Because of this long CO2 lifetime, we cannot solve the climate problem by slowing down emissions by 20% or 50% or even 80%. Computer models calculate that even if we stopped increasing CO2 now, the temperature would likely still rise another 0.8 degrees, as previously released carbon continues to overheat the atmosphere.

Our economic model has no simple way to account for environmental costs. Agriculture does not take into account the costs of soil depletion. Fossil fuel burning does not take into account modification of the atmosphere. People do not pay for the CO2 they emit. Habitat destruction does not take into account the destruction of species. Fishermen do not pay for the fish they take from the sea; lumber, oil, coal, and mining companies do not pay for their resources, aside from the cost to buy the land. Economic costs are only those of extraction and delivery — Earth is free.

Some people say that we’re not going to solve the climate crisis until we get rid of capitalism. Maybe there’s something to the argument but it’s just not relevant. There’s no conceivable possibility of the kind of social change that they’re talking about within the timescale that’s necessary to solve this problem. Couple of decades means urgent. This doesn’t mean everybody’s going to die in 20 years. It means processes will be set in motion that won’t be reversible. After that, you can’t do anything to control it. 

In From Beirut to Jerusalem, Thomas Friedman writes that a veteran Israeli religious politician Yosef Burg used to tell a joke about two Israelis discussing philosophy. One says to the other, “Are you an optimist or a pessimist?” and the other answers, “I’m an optimist, of course. I am certain that today will be better than tomorrow.” I am a similar optimist. Surprisingly, religion might have some valuable lessons for secular thought and the two need not be regarded as opposites. (And I say this even though I am not religious at all.)

The wickedest of all problems - VIII

Since all of us are in some way the beneficiaries of cheap fossil fuel, tackling climate change is like trying to build a movement against yourself. People perceive – correctly – that their individual actions will not make a decisive difference in the atmospheric concentration of CO2. Scientists say the available time for meaningful action on climate change is about twenty years. Maybe in hundred years, you could change lifestyles enough to matter – but that much time is not available.  

‘How is it possible, when presented with overwhelming evidence, even the evidence of our own eyes, that we can deliberately ignore something — while being entirely aware that this is what we are doing?’ This is the question that George Marshall explores in his book Don't Even Think About It. He concludes that if the weather extremes continue to intensify, the experience of coping with loss and anxiety will make people push it aside as something that they would rather not think about.

Every article on climate change attracts angry comments in social media. Experiments have shown that the insertion of aggressive comments do nothing to change people’s views but makes them hold on more firmly to the view they already hold. Climate change also lacks any readily identifiable external enemy or motive, has dispersed responsibility and diffused impacts. Daniel Gilbert, a professor of psychology at Harvard, argues that our long psychological evolution has prepared us to respond strongly to four key triggers that he denotes with the acronym PAIN:

Personal: Our brains are most highly attuned to identifying friends, enemies, defectors, and human agency.

Abrupt: We are most sensitive to sudden relative changes and tend to ignore slow-moving threats.

Immoral: We respond to things that we find to be indecent, impious, repulsive, or disgusting.

Now: Our ability to look into the future 

Gilbert says, the problem with climate change is that it doesn’t trigger any of these. Of the four, he  emphasizes the lack of Abrupt and Now. If our emotional circuitry perceives an immediate threat it will flood us with hormones which ready us to hit or run. But this does not happen if we hear of potential dangers that might emerge in years or centuries to come. Persuading people that there’s an odourless, tasteless, invisible gas that’s gathering in the heavens and capturing the sun’s heat because of what man does in using fossil fuels doesn't trigger any of these emotional circuits.

Unless you live in the Maldives or Bangladesh, the threat seems far away. If the pace of global warming were accelerated to a few years instead of over centuries, people would pay more attention. Gilbert cautions us not to underestimate the importance of Immoral. While we recognise that climate change is bad, it does not make us feel noxious or disgraced. He adds, “If global warming were caused by eating puppies, millions of Americans would be massing in the streets.”

We have two distinct information processing systems. One is analytical, logical, and can make sense of abstract symbols, words, and numbers. The other is driven by emotions (especially fear and anxiety), images, intuition, and experience. The analytic system is slow and deliberative, rationally weighing the evidence and probabilities, the emotional system is automatic, impulsive, and quick to apply mental shortcuts so that it can quickly reach conclusions.

Actually the most comprehensive, complex science shows the reality of climate change. But it is addressed to the analytical part of the brain; to people who are not wired to realise the dangers. Climate change will come over a long time horizon that we can’t see, so it’s hard to convince people. Threats to the global systems that support human life are too macro or micro for us to notice directly. So when we are faced with news of these global threats, our attention circuits get bored.

Our perception of risk is dominated by our emotional brain. It favours proximity, draws on personal experience, and deals with images and stories that speak to existing values. The theories, graphs, projects, and data that scientists rely on speak almost entirely to the rational brain. That helps us to evaluate the evidence and, for most people, to recognise that there is a major problem. But it does not spur us to action.  

The psychologists Kahneman and Tversky found that people are consistently far more averse to losses than gains, are far more sensitive to short-term costs than long-term costs, and privilege certainty over uncertainty. Kahneman sees climate change as a near perfect lineup of these biases and is not very optimistic. He says that to mobilise people, this has to become an emotional issue. The second problem is that dealing with climate change requires that people accept certain short-term costs and reductions in their living standards to avoid higher but uncertain losses that are far in the future. He says: 

No amount of psychological awareness will overcome people’s reluctance to lower their standard of living. So that’s my bottom line: There is not much hope. I’m thoroughly pessimistic. I’m sorry.