One of the key problems with global warming is that what we are doing today doesn’t affect us today; it affects us, or our children and grandchildren ten, twenty, even forty years from now. Danger is looming, but not on a time scale we’re used to. With GW, the results of today’s actions lie far in the future, so it’s not triggering those effective alarms I just talked about.
So if we wait and only act once the thirty or forty years have passed, when the problem’s effects will have their greatest impact, it will be too late.
We humans just aren’t designed to plan ahead and act with such long delays. We plan for tomorrow, next week, next quarter, or occasionally with a five year plan. But a forty year plan? Especially one where we must act now in some huge way and then wait, wondering if what we have done was either effective or just a waste of resources. I don’t know of any case where we humans have ever had to look that far ahead. And I’m guessing that from an evolutionary point of view we are not designed for that kind of extended foresight.
However, just because it’s difficult for us doesn’t mean I don’t think we can find a solution, or can take effective group action to solve the problem. I just think it is useful to know what we’re up against. The more completely we know the enemy, the more effective we can be in the next battle.
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