CLIMATE CHANGE OPTIMISM BIAS WINDOWS

Other people may need to make tracks, but your storm windows are top-of-the-line or your house is on slightly higher ground, so why get off the couch? If we find it so easy to talk ourselves out of acting in the face of a storm that’s just days away, a disaster that’s many years away doesn’t stand a chance. Here, what’s known as the optimism bias is at work.

Indeed, even when the risk is not far in the future-when, say, a hurricane is cannonballing toward the coast and the government orders an evacuation-plenty of people still don’t budge. People just aren’t going to inconvenience themselves unless they’re forced to.” “If we think the consequences are far in the future, we tend to discount the risk. “When it comes to acting on problems, the lure of our current comforts and conveniences will often cause us to act contrary to our values,” says Paul Slovic, University or Oregon psychologist and the president of Decision Research, and international group of investigators who study decision-making and risk. And while the announcement has been reported widely, the public reaction-again, as always-has been meh. Unless we act dramatically and fast, the report says, by 2030 temperatures will have risen to 2.7º F (1.5º C) above the average of the pre-industrial era-the threshold that has long been cited as the tipping point for calamity. That odd contradiction is on display again, in the wake of an announcement by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that a catastrophe is nigh-that that distant future of an Earth best by floods, droughts, wildfires and typhoons isn’t distant anymore, but as little as 12 years away. So when it comes to the loss of the entire planet, well, we ought to take action. If crocodiles keep coming out of the river, we fish somewhere else. If there are lions on one part of the savannah, we go to another.

Humans have always been an exceedingly risk-averse species-which is how we came to survive as a species at all. You’d think the end of the world would be enough to get us scared.

Climate change optimism bias