Warning: Incoherent ranting ahead. Read at your own peril.
Just came across this surprisingly condescending commentary by Dr. David Suzuki on the public's ignorance towards global warming.
Recently, my foundation conducted a focus group about global warming to see where people are at in their understanding of this complex and challenging problem. The results? Let's just say they were disconcerting, to say the least.
Simply put, most people don't have a clue. The majority felt that global warming was a pretty important problem and they were concerned about it. But when pressed as to why it was a problem or what caused the problem, all heck broke loose.
Apparently, according to the average Joe, global warming is happening because we've created a hole in the ozone layer, allowing the sun's rays to enter the atmosphere and heat up the earth -- or something like that. The cause of the problem is cars, or airplanes, or aerosol cans. No one really knows for sure.
Dr. Suzuki continues:
This is really quite remarkable. I would have thought that such confused understandings of the issue would have been commonplace five or six years ago, but with global warming being in newspapers on practically a daily basis this spring, on the front cover of magazines, in theatres (An Inconvenient Truth), and a hot political issue as well, surely people would get it by now.
Apparently I was wrong. People don't get it. This is a big problem, because if people don't get it, then they don't really care, so politicians and CEOs don't really care, and status quo rules the day. And blindly we march into the sunset.
So Dr. Suzuki's logic goes something like this: I think global warming is a big problem and everyone should care about it...the public doesn't fully understand the facts, therefore, they are all clueless lemmings leading the world to mass suicide.
I have another theory. Maybe the scientific community provides so much conflicting information that it is impossible for the public to decipher fact from political posturing so they just throw their hands in the air in disgust.
News on global warming reminds me an awful lot of news on obesity: low fat diets are the way to go, low carb diets work, vegetarians live longer, vegetarians are less healthy, there are 4 food groups, there's a food pyramid...everyday there is a new study claiming a new reason why we are fat and how we should fix it.* Sure we could view the public's every increasing weight on ignorance, but I think it is just as likely contradicting information overload.
Same goes with global warming. There is so much information and misinformation and political posturing floating around that those outside the dual ivory turrets of academia and environmentalism have little time or need to sift through the confusion.
I pride myself on being able to separate my job from my personal life. Outside of work I try not to talk about any of this stuff. I'm not a evangelical environmentalist and I don't plan to be. Why? Because nothing shuts down a tailgate** faster than "Hey, why are y'all having so much fun when we're all going to be scorched to death in the next 100 year unless we stop burning fossil fuels now?"
I've never seen a spontaneous conversation about global warming erupt at a cocktail party. Gas prices? Yep. all the time. Because gas prices affect people day to day and the results are clear. But a global warming discussion, never. It doesn't affect day to day life so it's not at the forefront of people thoughts.
Dr. Suzuki says:
With each new piece of research, the expected effects of global warming become clearer, more urgent and more disturbing. Scientists say this will be one of the biggest challenges humanity will face this century.
I disagree. Here's my take:
With each new piece of research, the expected effects of global warming become more [muddled]. [Some scientists] say this will be one of the biggest challenges humanity will face this century. [Others say everything is honky-dory. The public is waiting for them to make up their minds].
Notes:
*Today's reason for our morbid obesity is that we aren't capable of estimating the number of calories in large portions of food. It's a psychological bias that we have absolutely no control over, so we should just blame the fast food restaurant for making the portions too big.
"This is not an issue of knowledge, of motivational biases that people want to lie (about what they eat). It's just ingrained perceptual bias that we can't control," said Pierre Chandon, a co-author of the study and assistant professor of marketing at the international business school INSEAD in Fontainebleau near Paris, France.
But this still doesn't explain why I have to eat everything a restaurant puts in front of me. I blame my father. He used to make us sit at the table until we ate everything on our plate. Now I sit in McDonald's until I've eaten my Big Mac, super-sized fries and gallon of Coke--along with my kids left-overs (because I'll be damned if I'm going to give my kids someone to blame for all of their problems later in life). I think I'm going to call a lawyer and sue McDonald's for talking advantage of my 'ingrained perceptual bias.' That should fall under the ADA, right?
**Go Bucks!
