New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof's recent column, Our Beaker Is Staritng to Boil, visually and orally depicts the melting of Himalayan and other glaciers by mountaineer David Breashears and others:
“I was just incredulous,” he told me. “We took measurements with laser rangefinders to measure the loss of height of the glaciers. The drop was often the equivalent of a 35- or 40-story building.”
Mr. Breashears led me through a display of these paired photographs at the Asia Society in New York. One 1921 photo by George Mallory, the famous mountaineer who died near the summit of Everest three years later, shows the Main Rongbuk Glacier. Mr. Breashears located the very spot from which Mallory had snapped that photo and took another — only it is a different scene, because the glacier has lost 330 feet of vertical ice.
The next paragraph struck me:
Some research in social psychology suggests that our brains are not well adapted to protect ourselves from gradually encroaching harms. We evolved to be wary of saber-toothed tigers and blizzards, but not of climate change — and maybe that’s also why we in the news media tend to cover weather but not climate. The upshot is that we’re horrifyingly nonchalant at the prospect that rising carbon emissions may devastate our favorite planet.
Sure makes sense to me, especially in light of one of my favorite Dutch aphorisms: "No policy without a calamity." If you're a Neanderthal and you're concerned about advancing continental glaciation, you're likely to meet your demise much sooner, courtesy of some fearsome beast or a club from your adversary. So I guess we can blame evolution for our failure to respond to slowly-evolving threats.
As for those slowly-boiling frogs in a beaker? It seems they do recognize the threat and will try to escape as the water warms. Not so sure about humans.
Good column, well worth your time.
"The climate change problem is at its heart an ethical problem. It’s a problem of income distribution and it’s a problem of income distribution with dimensions that we don’t usually think about very much." -- Ross Garnaut
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