Imagine your child is playing on a climbing frame. They lean out too far and loo…

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Imagine your child is playing on a climbing frame. They lean out too far and look like they’re about to fall off a two metre ledge. What do you do? Chances are you dash towards the climbing frame with a speed you didn’t know you possessed! Now imagine that someone tells you that something called climate change could affect your child’s life to an unimaginable degree at some stage in the future. What do you do? Chances are, you will do nothing at all!!! We have evolved over millions of years to be able to deal with threats to our survival, but we’re not designed to respond to abstract things which will affect us in the future, like climate change.

Experiments have shown that we are bad at even visualizing what the future might look like. During one of the studies participants were asked to imagine their lives ten years into the future. fMRI scans showed that their brain activity was the same as if they were talking about strangers… In order to respond to climate change, we need to have the ability to project our minds into the future and grapple with what will happen on Earth if the destruction of the planet continues at the current rate. That is something that we’re just not equipped to do. We are so adaptive that we easily accept news like hottest summers, or frequent hurricanes without thinking about potential threats to out lives.

Being so adaptive and responding to immediate threats has helped us to live successfully on Earth for thousands of years. However, to deal with climate change we need to develop a different set of skills.

#climateaction #climatejustice
#globalwarming #climatechange
Source: @wearetheweather

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