I'm reminded of Kubrick's quote about the atom bomb[0]: "People react primarily to direct experience and not to abstractions; it is very rare to find anyone who

I'm reminded of Kubrick's quote about the atom bomb[0]: "People react primarily to direct experience and not to abstractions; it is very rare to find anyone who can become emotionally involved with an abstraction. The longer the bomb is around without anything happening, the better the job that people do in psychologically denying its existence. It has become as abstract as the fact that we are all going to die someday, which we usually do an excellent job of denying." A disturbing corollary: the same challenge of processing an abstraction exists amongst most non-experts who accept AGW (and I'm among them). Hence symbolic gestures (banning straws), conflation with other sacred-cow political issues (corporate capitalism), belief in looming extinction (unlikely; the threat is to civilization, not homo sapiens), all generally filtered through a "purity" moral matrix (to put it in Haidt-ian terms). As the complex reality becomes filtered through moralizing and politicizing, the other side digs in their heels for predictable tribalist and game-theoretic reasons. It's a truly wicked problem. [0]: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1966/11/12/how-about-a-little-game https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1966/11/12/how-about-a-li...