The Real Climate Crisis

By now we have all heard about the climate crisis–from wildfires devastating wineries in the West; to buildings that can no longer be insured in Florida; to the inability of Chicago to deal with its waste because water levels in Lake Michigan have begun swinging wildly. It is clear that climate change is here and now, everywhere in the world. Rich nations will not be immune.
Climate change has affected me personally. The entire neighborhood of my childhood was demolished in the wake of the 2008 flood. It was about 20 homes, situated on an island where there had always been flooding. Still, it brought it home. Climate change is real here in Iowa. The rich productivity of the land here relied on a cycle of cold winters with heavy snows and hot humid summers. The harsh winters and hot summers made Iowa a difficult place to live in, but they also made the corn grow. Now, every winter, the snowfall is less. Every summer it floods more. Farmers here are increasingly dependent on GMO crops. The moral of the story: no one anywhere is unaffected by climate change.
And that leads to the real crisis behind climate change–a crisis far harder to deal with even than the droughts and floods that threaten entire industries. It is a crisis of confidence in science, a crisis of critical thinking. I can look out at my life–my childhood home, my community’s farmers, and see the threat of climate change. But there are people around me that can’t. How can people mistrust not only science, but evidence in their everyday lives?
One of the primary functions of government is to overcome the destructive human propensity to want to be told that a complex threat either isn’t real or that it won’t affect them personally. It is a universal human tendency, but one that must be addressed in order to maintain a democracy. Building a functional democratic society requies telling people what they don’t want to hear. It is hard, but no gain in climate science will mean anything until the eletment of human psychology is overcome. Government can and must ways to overcome this human tendency. This ethic has been largely forgotten in America.
The question that needs to be asked most right now is not how do we go about the mechanics of slowing and eventually stopping climate change–we know how to do that. The technology and the know-how largely exist. What absolutely has to happen for us to overcome it, is to address the propensity in all of us to believe someone when they are telling us what we want to hear. The enemy is not nature or even the carbon we are putting into the air–the enemy is something that exists in all of us.