The political reporting site fivethirtyeight has produced an inverted pyramid graphic that well explains why concern for climate change, global warming, global weirding, you name it, is a problem not for us to worry about.
It's just too abstract, far off, something for others to furrow their brows for.
According to the results of a survey out this spring, climate change is something for plants and animals, future generations, people in developing countries, and others, but not me, to be concerned with. And this is why little or nothing gets done to reduce carbon emissions. If we have to choose between solving the problems in front of us or those facing others or the future which to choose?
This is a visualization of the results of a study, Climate Change in the American Mind, published recently by the Yale Project on Climate Change and the George Mason Center for Climate Change Communication.
Yet the main problem we face with kicking the can down the road, allowing heat-trapping carbon to keep building in the atmosphere, is that unless we set ourselves on a pathway towards drastically reducing our emissions now, little we do in the future will matter, as has been written here and many places elsewhere previously:
Signs From Earth: A Thousand Years of Warming Ahead
Signs From Earth: Hot Planet - Our Path Ahead
Sources:fivethirtyeight.com: The Environmental Inverted Pyramid
Yale Project on Climate Change: Climate Change in the American Mind
Yale Project on Climate Change: (PDF): Global Warming's Six Americas
Comments