Cognitive Dissonance

Manic depression 

Fractures my soul

     - Jimi Hendrix

I just don't know

       -Allman Brothers

PSA :.    Several African countries got "rain bombed",thanks to the carbon we emitted over the last 50 years.  Here are some ways to help. 

Here's Eric Holthaus on the fundamental injustice of climate change

"The initial post-storm reports are harrowing: 90 percent of Beira, Mozambique — a city of more than 500,000 people — has been destroyed by floodwaters. The first aid workers to reach the hardest-hit areas found people clinging to trees and rooftops, awaiting rescue, with waters still rising. Social media posts from Zimbabwe showed people swept away on flooded roads and aerial images in Mozambique showed countless homes underwater. Nearly 3 million people have been affected across the region, one of the poorest in the world.

Greetings

        I've been watching Gretta Thuberg videos.    It's just so fascinating.   And heart breaking.  Here is a 16 year old who knows more about climate change than 99 percent of adults.   But she's wired differently than the rest of us.   She is a straight shooter.  She lacks cognitive dissonance.  She can't hold two opposing ideas in her head at the same time.  The rest of say, "Yeah, its a big problem, but let's not think about it.".  She thinks " Well, if it's a big problem, we should think about it.  It's precisely what we should think about."

      Maybe it's her super power.  Maybe it's her curse.

       Here's her TED talk

       Here she is with her dad.   

        It's not easy being Gretta, or her dad.

      The NYT had an op Ed piece by David Wallace Wells called "Time to Panic",   which makes the same basic point.   Time is running out.   And he explains with charts and graphs what's going to happen

"As temperatures rise, this could mean many of the biggest cities in the Middle East and South Asia would become lethally hot in summer, perhaps as soon as 2050. There would be ice-free summers in the Arctic and the unstoppable disintegration of the West Antarctic’s ice sheet, which some scientists believe has already begun, threatening the world’s coastal cities with inundation. Coral reefs would mostly disappear. And there would be tens of millions of climate refugees, perhaps many more, fleeing droughts, flooding and extreme heat, and the possibility of multiple climate-driven natural disasters striking simultaneously.

Nevertheless, we expect things to go on as they are

"I know the science is true, I know the threat is all-encompassing, and I know its effects, should emissions continue unabated, will be terrifying. And yet, when I imagine my life three decades from now, or the life of my daughter five decades now, I have to admit that I am not imagining a world on fire but one similar to the one we have now. That is how hard it is to shake complacency. We are all living in delusion, unable to really process the news from science that climate change amounts to an all-encompassing threat. Indeed, a threat the size of life itself.

How can we be this deluded? One answer comes from behavioral economics. The scroll of cognitive biases identified by psychologists and fellow travelers over the past half-century can seem, like a social media feed, bottomless, and they distort and distend our perception of a changing climate. These optimistic prejudices, prophylactic biases and emotional reflexes form an entire library of climate delusion.

We build our view of the universe outward from our own experience, a reflexive tendency that surely shapes our ability to comprehend genuinely existential threats to the species. We have a tendency to wait for others to act, rather than acting ourselves; a preference for the present situation; a disinclination to change things; and an excess of confidence that we can change things easily, should we need to, no matter the scale. We can’t see anything but through cataracts of self-deception."

This "feature "of  human psycho!ogy is very useful to the energy companies, who have, as Robert Hunzicer points out, inserted themselves into the COP process.

" Fossil fuel companies were significant sponsors at COP24 in Katowice. Their logos were ubiquitous. And, at a mind-blowing out of this world event, the Polish Pavilion was stuffed full of actual lumps of black coal, as samplers.

Poland’s President Andrzej Duda told COP24 delegates: “Using coal is not in contradiction with climate protection in Poland because we can lower the emissions and ensure economic growth at the same time.” What!!! Who falls for this kind of claptrap?

ExxonMobil pledged to cut its methane emissions and contribute funds for a carbon tax campaign in the U.S. Oh, please, stop it! Pseudo solutions like carbon markets and geo-engineering promises (that don’t work to scale) are pushed by corporate interests to legitimatize their current CO2 emissions. Oh please! It’s a ruse because if you lay claim to geo-engineering technology that fixes CO2 emissions, then you legitimize using as much fossil fuel as your little heart desires. But, the brutal truth is the technology is not perfected. Not by a long shot. Then what?"

Here in the US, there is some new interest in dealing with the climate problem.  Unfortunately many see it as just  another club to bash the other side in the" culture wars".  

Meanwhile Gretta is still waiting