This post has been sitting in my drafts for a few months now:

You only have to talk to a climate scientist or someone well versed with that knowledge for a few minutes to realize if humans continue consuming resources and increasing population at the rate we are, Earth can only sustain for a few hundred, or a hundred years at most. Even those who are naive enough to cast anthropogenic climate change, or even natural climate change, off as a hoax, cannot be naive enough to think that, under status quo, our planet can sustain over 9 billion people.

Then why do we, myself included, carry on with our wasteful behaviors? 

I came across this video of Dan Gilbert, a psychology professor at Harvard, answering this question from a psychological point of view. Here’s a quick summary:

Intentional vs. Natural

“Understanding what others are up to — what they know and want, what they are doing and planning — has been so crucial to the survival of our species that our brains have developed an obsession with all things human,” we pay attention to actions, not accidents. Diseases and illnesses tend to worry us less than, say, airplanes flying into buildings. The former is something that “just happens,” and the latter is something done by other humans. Anthrax scares us more than influenza, even though nearly no one dies of anthrax over a year, whereas a quarter million to half-million people die of the flu. 

Amoral? 

We don’t have a moral tie, except for I guess environmentalists, animal activists, philosophers studying this kind of thing, to climate change. We judge women about sex, people for what they eat, but as Daniel Gilbert says it, “human societies […don’t have] a moral rule about atmospheric chemistry.” Drinking from a plastic water bottle doesn’t make us feel like we’re doing something wrong, (okay it makes me feel like I’m doing something wrong, but for most people, this mental connection isn’t there.)

“Threat to our future, not our afternoon.”

We don’t think global warming is happening in our lifetime. This is wrong, but that’s the way we see it. It’s going to happen tomorrow, not tonight, we can put it off. Part of the reason our species has thrived on our planet is because of our ability to think of the future, but even then, we still think more in terms of now and the few minutes following that.

Gradual vs. Abrupt Change

This is a trick I picked up quickly when it came to televisions and volume. Someone tells you to the lower the volume, and you can lower it drastically so they notice, and then turn it back up one notch at a time, and they won’t notice. Global warming is happening slowly. If you could travel at intervals of twenty years, the change would seem abrupt, and you’d go back to the present and share how devastating climate change is. If you stayed in the present, the changes would happen at sluggish pace and you wouldn’t register them as something harmful, as is happening now.