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Not to excuse anything, but the main difference is the time scale—within days/weeks we saw differences, and death counts... with climate change it's not only di
by geerlingguy 7y ago
Not to excuse anything, but the main difference is the time scale—within days/weeks we saw differences, and death counts... with climate change it's not only difficult to measure easy-to-understand direct correlation sometimes, it also is at minimum on time scales of months to years.
Most news cycles are hours or days, not months or years.
- csomar 7y ago> with climate change it's not only difficult to measure easy-to-understand direct correlation sometimes, it also is at minimum on time scales of months to years. Isn't this, exactly, why we are in trouble with the coronavirus. Our inability to see a disaster looming ahead?
- godelski 7y agoThis is exactly right. As young people we are afraid of climate because we know it will affect us in the future. That's not true for older people (well, we can quite easily argue that it is __currently__ affecting people). I think another good example is nuclear. It may have low deaths per terrawatt of energy, but the deaths it causes are localized, physically and temporally. It doesn't matter that each year more people die in the US from coal ash than all those that ever have (or will) from (current) nuclear disasters. These kinds of things are well known in psychology (including the simplest: marshmallow experiment). Humans are bad at risk estimation and even worse when it comes to time scales. If it isn't happening before our eyes then chances are we're pretty bad at estimating risk.