Free Don't Even Think About It by George Marshall Page B

accepted into our status quo and assumed to be part of normal life, it requires a far higher level of threat to have them removed. People might very well mobilize against a new energy technology that causes climate change, but not against the cars, planes, and power plants that are already woven into the fabric of their lives.
    Slovic argues that extreme weather events, even highly visible ones such as Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, are also part of our accepted way of life—our status quo—in ways that can lead us to accept rather than resist them. He suggests that extreme weather events seem familiar, and we are accustomed—in the developed world at any rate—to regard them as manageable. “Even when they do happen to us,” he says, “the storm goes over. You look out the window and, hey, it’s a beautiful day.” As I found in Bastrop and New Jersey, people are initially traumatized but dust themselves off and focus on reconstruction and moving forward.
    In language theory, the term “false friends” recognizes the trap posed by words that look and sound the same but have developed entirely different meanings—as anyone shopping for clothes on the other side of the Atlantic will find when they ask for pants, knickers, vests, or jumpers. Climate change has plenty of linguistic false friends and, as I will show, there is endless potential for misunderstanding scientific terms when they are used in a wider context. But the weather is also a kind of false friend: It looks and feels familiar, and we have a wide range of available experience to draw on that can mislead us.
    Paul Slovic suggests that the third major problem is that climate change is not readily imaginable. “With threats of graphic imaginability, such as terrorism after the 9/11 attacks, you lose all sense of proportion and respond with high alarm to low probabilities. The availability bias that draws on recent experience keeps the threat alive, and the uncertainty of when the next attack might come does not diminish that fear; it amplifies it.”
    But because climate change does not have the same stigma, and extreme weather events have a degree of familiarity, the uncertainty of its impacts do not instill dread but rather, Slovic says, “give you the leeway to believe what you want to believe.”
    Believe what you want to believe? This is a telling phrase. Slovic is saying that even though it involves so many of the characteristics of dread and unknown risk, climate change does not feel frightening unless you actively choose to see it that way. If you are already inclined (by your values, politics, or social group) to see climate change as dangerous, then it looks really dangerous. If you are not inclined that way, then it looks exaggerated. Once again, the perception of climate change is being determined by the social lens you see it through, and, once again, there is a powerful feedback that tends to pull people apart.

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    Uncertain Long-Term Costs
     
    Why Our Cognitive Biases Line Up Against Climate Change
     
     
     
     
     
     
    “This is not what you might want to hear,” says Professor Daniel Kahneman. “I am very sorry, but I am deeply pessimistic. I really see no path to success on climate change.”
    I assure him that this indeed what I want to hear and the reason why I wanted to talk to him. Kahneman, after all, received a Nobel Prize for his pioneering work on the psychology of decision making, and his bestselling book, Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow , has been a major influence on my own thinking.
    In our packed cafe in downtown New York, the background noise is painfully high, and Kahneman delivers his argument a few words at a time in between long pauses for another spoonful from his seemingly bottomless bowl of tomato soup. Piece by piece, he meticulously outlines the reasons why he thinks that climate change is a hopeless problem and why it doesn’t have the necessary characteristics for seriously mobilizing people’s sense of