Original article (in Croatian) was published on 20/02/2023
There are many brakes in our brains that refuse to accept the danger of climate change, and some of the most dangerous are hidden in our political viewpoints.
Why don’t our brains understand global warming and climate change? Why do you and I persistently refuse to accept our share of responsibility for extreme heat, polar cold snaps, melting glaciers and permafrost, floods and droughts, rising sea levels, the greenhouse effect, and everything else that is usually described as human-caused global warming?
When I complete the test on how much I poison the environment, it turns out that if everyone behaved like me, it would take three planets like this, not just this main one. Namely, I waste so many resources because the food is not from local fields, because I use more electricity and water than I should, because I throw away too much food that has rotted for no reason, because I am usually alone in the car and rarely use public transportation.
After all, why should I change any of these habits when, wherever I look around, it seems to me that everyone is behaving much worse – some in the parking lot of the shopping center are sitting in a luxury limousine with the gasoline engine running and spending for half an hour on their cell phones, neighbours in buildings throw a lot more garbage, and the most powerful people who make crucial decisions drive around in yachts and business jets and pollute much, much more. Some billionaire, and there are those in Croatia as well, is responsible for a million times more harmful greenhouse gases than the average person, and 10% of the richest people in the world pollute as much as half of poor humanity.
We could list statistics that show differences between individuals, countries, and continents, but all these would be just additional excuses that would not help you and me change our behaviour.
Is the situation therefore hopeless? Before we try to answer that question, let’s try to scratch under the surface and check what is preventing us from coming to our senses.
The brain of a primitive man
Experts offer numerous and varied opinions on psychological obstacles related to climate change and often repeat that our brains are simply not designed for such complicated tasks.
For approximately two hundred thousand years, our ancestors only figured out how to escape from some threat or reach it, how to find shelter and food somewhere and release the sexual drive to give birth to some descendants. The genes of those who were unsuccessful in this simply failed, therefore it is not out of place for us to appreciate our ancestors because they were able to withstand all adversity and pass on their genes generation after generation until today. However, in all this struggle for survival, the brains of our ancestors did not really plan for the future because they had too many worries about how to get through one day at a time.
Our thinking about the future and the time ahead of us, about education, career, retirement, health or savings developed only in the past few hundred years. Evolutionarily, therefore, we are not quite ready to accept and understand the causes and consequences of very complex climatic entanglements that threaten to destroy everything in a few decades, just as we are not very smart about the consequences of our vices – smoking, alcohol, sugar and many others. We always hope that we will be the chosen ones who smoked two packs a day from the fifth grade and, miraculously, made it to a hundred, while consuming two kilos of pork daily with vine, spritzer, bevanda and a few crates of beer.
Just one more minute to shower
In the same way, we do not want to believe that our daily activities – from turning on all the light bulbs in the apartment to taking a little longer shower under a pleasant stream of massaging hot water – contribute little by little to turning the entire planet into a possible refugee camp where millions and billions will flee from one end of the continent on the other in search of water, food and shelter from the climate which became very angry with us.
Even as I write this, I subconsciously hope that none of this will happen, which shows how much I inadvertently fall into the group of those who do not acknowledge the occurrence of climate change. Namely, this problem is so complex that it is easier for us to wave our hands, as we would do if someone pushed us to solve some complicated mathematical problem with integrals and derivatives. There, some infinitesimal calculation in higher mathematics is an insurmountable problem for most of us, and the same thing is with the climate and its winds, upper and lower layers of the atmosphere, the effects of sea currents, ice poles, mountains and plains and countless other factors.
Atmosphere, hold on
Even the popular German theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder admits that for quite a long time she completely misinterpreted how carbon dioxide causes global warming in the first place and recommends that we learn more about our precious atmosphere for a better understanding. Namely, the atmosphere somehow adapts and reacts to all the greenhouse gases that reach it from the surface, because the only way to maintain the balance of the entire system is to heat or cool the Earth’s surface. The universe, the Sun, the planet, the atmosphere and the molecules are therefore of no concern to us humans, but they just want to exchange energy in their own way, which is briefly explained in this infographic that explains how greenhouse gases cause global warming.
After the Sun’s rays pass through the atmosphere and touch the Earth’s surface, the surface heats up and emits infrared radiation. This radiation remains trapped by greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the most important of which is carbon dioxide.
The question is, of course, how much these simplified infographics can help to turn on the light bulb overhead and for the eureka moment to occur, after which everything becomes completely clear to us. Our brain abilities are limited by many prejudices, some of which have a great influence on our in-one-ear-and-out-the-other behaviour regarding climate drama, and one of these is short-sightedness regarding future generations.
According to a study on evolution and human behaviour, the range of our care ranges from great-grandparents to great-grandchildren, and everything before and after that is somehow unfathomable and very distant to us. If you are young today, your great-grandchildren probably seem like a distant future, but for the planet, all those years are just a blink of an eye, and if climate change really worries us, we should move our attention much further in time.
And history teaches us that…
If we look back, and not at the time of our great-grandmothers or when Croats moved to the Adriatic five hundred million years earlier, we will see that a lot of preparation was needed for the arrival of our species, which is what the following graph shows. Look at how the Earth is always turbulent – half a billion years ago, scientists say, plants and trees (marked with 1) appeared, which began to absorb carbon dioxide and thus cooled the surface enough that ice could begin to form at the poles (2). Volcanic eruptions warmed violently and for a long time (3), mammals began to develop while it was still quite warm (4), and then the temperature levelled off and provided a decent habitat for us humans. However, we are now heating the atmosphere (5) in a very, very short period of time.
Scientists do not know exactly how and why what is shown here happened in the long past, but it is clear to us that the Earth goes through phases of warming and cooling with and without humans.
Our climate – bye, our brains are high
One of the consequences of evolution that further hinders us from reacting to global warming is the so-called bystander effect, that is, the apathy that, according to psychological theory, overwhelms us if we are surrounded by others in a situation where someone needs help. The larger the group of people, the stronger the bystander effect, which means that we expect someone else to step in and do something, and in the case of the climate crisis we pretend that we are not personally obliged to do anything because that responsibility lies with political leaders and APs (current politicians ).
It doesn’t help that global warming is constantly trumpeted in all media because too much information leads to a kind of dullness when our brains become numb and stop paying attention. Much like when we hear that someone kills with an automatic rifle in America again or when a new shady affair breaks out in Croatia in which the political powers are involved, everything seems like an old story that repeats itself, and we often react to articles about the climate scandal with a shrug. Researchers from Yale University showed high school students films about the catastrophic consequences of climate change and found that strong negative emotions developed during viewing it and that those who watched the most films were ultimately the least willing to engage in actions for the benefit of the climate.
Gorilla? Where?
Certain inadvertent blindness occurs in experts as well, as evidenced by a study conducted by the American Psychological Science Association that tested 24 experienced radiologists with a series of lung images. In fact, they planted the image of a gorilla in some of the images and found that 83 percent of the radiologists had not seen the gorilla at all. The invisible gorilla is by now a common term when talking about selective perception and our human limitations because we miss seeing a lot in a situation when we are focused on something else.
It all started when American psychologists proved with an experiment several decades ago that we are unable to see the person who is dressed as a gorilla in front of us because we have devoted our attention to some other event.
There are still many brakes in our brain circuits that refuse to accept the danger of climate change, and some of the most dangerous are hidden in our ideological attitudes and political viewpoints. For many of us, it would be easiest to interpret the whole situation through some insidious enemies, say North Korea, China, Serbs, Americans, immigrants, and people of a different religion or skin colour. Clouds, winds, disasters and rising temperatures cannot be stopped at the state border, but the reconciliation of national, nationalist, and even extreme positions with the discussion of climate and environmental concerns could end up on the wrong track.
The horror of ecofascism
If you follow forums on social networks, you’ve probably already noticed how immigrants, who are already arriving in Croatia from numerous Asian and African countries, are blamed for leaving garbage behind. In America, on the other hand, until recently the prosecutor of the federal state of Arizona, Mark Brnovich, whose father is from Montenegro and whose mother is from Split, said that those who enter the US illegally from Mexico individually leave three to four kilos of garbage in the desert and thus endanger wildlife and the environment. Brnovich, a Republican, also filed a lawsuit against the administration of President Joe Biden, believing that leniency towards illegal immigrants from Mexico is leading to an environmental disaster.
Concern for sustainable development was expressed in a twisted way by an American who in the summer of 2019 killed 22 people and wounded even more in a shopping centre in the Texas city of El Paso. Before the terrible killing spree, he published a pamphlet on the Internet in which, angry at what he said was the Hispanic invasion of Texas, he wrote: “If we can get rid of enough people, our way of life would be more sustainable”.
A few months earlier in New Zealand, a white supremacist killed 51 people in two mosques, after announcing in a proclamation how much he despised all immigrants, Muslims and many others, considering them responsible for climate change, among other things. The perpetrator of the massacre saw salvation for the climate and the environment in the killing of non-Europeans.
The last cigarette is coming to an end
And among you who are reading this, there are probably, unfortunately, those who will find such messages, also known as ecofascism, acceptable. On the other hand, there is not even a more optimistic variant in sight, in which we mostly benevolent Earthlings would collectively become aware of global warming and the need for an agreement without conflict or killing. For lack of better comparisons, let’s remember how it all unfolded with cigarettes or seat belts in cars. Anyone a little more mature will confirm how much resistance there was in accepting that a seat belt protects the head or that smoking is quite harmful to health, and it took us several decades for that process during which, for various reasons, we persistently drove with the seat belt unfastened, a cigarette in hand and a full ashtray.
That recently acceptable behaviour is a rarity today, although we all know someone who has remained the most persistent in old habits. Will something similar happen in our relationship with the atmosphere, that is, with a few legal provisions and with some evidence of the severe consequences of irresponsible pollution of the Earth’s mantle, will we mostly succeed in instilling in our brain cells that we too can contribute to the solution? The problem is that we may not have time to wait several decades for such a change.