Dangerous Thinking: Inertia in the Face of Climate Change

The Scoop: John J. Clague, Director or the Center for Natural Hazards Research, discusses why people are still apathetic about climate change - and why it's a very dangerous mind set for all of us.

Scientists involved in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have reached a consensus that humans are changing Earth's climate.

This message has been conveyed to governments and the public through movies such as An Inconvenient Truth, books such as The Weather Makers, television, and countless newspaper and magazine articles. Yet, most people do not take the matter seriously, and essential behavioral responses are slow in coming. An important question is why?

A major reason for individual and societal inertia on this issue is that most people are skeptical that the problem is as serious as scientists claim. Their attitudes are reinforced by contrarians and by powerful self-interest groups and governments, which have defused public concern about climate change while encouraging human behavior that is destructive to the environment.

Although a normal and essential part of science, debate is perceived by the public as evidence that IPCC could be wrong. So let's wait until all scientists agree before we alter our behavior. This rationalization arises from a poor understanding of how science functions. Further, it gives the naysayers the same weight as the vast majority of knowledgeable climate scientists -- a very egalitarian approach, but a dangerous one nonetheless.

Carbon dioxide is odorless, invisible, and occurs in the atmosphere in very small concentrations (currently 384 parts per million). How can small increases in such a benign gas cause harm? Yet, increases in small amounts of carbon dioxide, methane, and other greenhouse gases can heat Earth's atmosphere.

Carbon dioxide now is more abundant in the atmosphere than it has been at any time in the past 400,000 years and perhaps 3 million years, and concentrations continue to rise. Scientists have not made the public aware of the one-on-one, lock-step relation between atmospheric temperatures and carbon dioxide documented from ice cores spanning the past many hundreds of thousands of years.

Unlike many global threats to humanity, such as pandemics and nuclear war, climate supposedly changes slowly. If the changes are slow, perhaps they can be reversed or we can adapt to them. However, researchers have shown that huge changes in climate have occurred in the recent geologic past over periods as short as a decade; perhaps even a year or two. The issues of climate thresholds and "tipping points", hinted at by the recent rapid decline in Arctic sea ice, are only now coming to the public's attention.

Most people mistakenly believe that climate warming will have beneficial effects. If you suffer through the cold winters of Edmonton or Minneapolis, your first reaction may be to "bring it on!"

Scientists have shown that climate warming may benefit some regions by extending zones of arable land, but global agricultural production will decrease if the atmosphere warms more than 2 degrees C. Furthermore, sea-level rise, warmer oceans, and other global effects of climate warming will affect all and benefit no one.

Few people will sacrifice until others do. It seems to be inherently human to believe that one person's contribution to a problem is insignificant and therefore excusable. Let someone else sacrifice before I change my own behavior.

Finally, people have become addicted to oil and will not readily kick the habit. The infrastructure of the developed world is deeply rooted in the oil economy and cannot be quickly or easily changed to one run on renewable energy. Energy analysts have shown that fossil fuels will continue to underpin the economies of the developed world through the remainder of this century.

In coming years, we will see a rapid increase in the use of alternative sources of energy, but no energy comes without a price to the environment. Conservation and slow conversion of our economy to a lower, carbon-based one are desirable and must be encouraged, but there is no silver bullet that will fix things, and greenhouse gas emissions probably will continue to rise over the next several decades.

The effects of these increases can be debated, but there can be little argument that humanity is voluntarily conducting the grandest experiment in its existence. Our species conceivably could be the first to destroy itself with full awareness of what it is doing.

John J. Clague is the director of the Center for Natural Hazards Research at the Simon Fraser University in Canada. The views expressed are the author's alone and do not represent the official position of the Discovery Channel.

Article posted on March 16, 2009

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