Are we heeding mother nature’s warnings?

Fires that have consumed swathes of Australia, the Arctic and now the western US are lighting only a tiny flame under climate action for the world’s top polluters. It’s hard to imagine how the past two years could have included more environmental alarm bells, from the ancient peatlands ablaze in the thawing north to mercury hitting just over 54 degrees Celsius (130 Farenheit) in California’s Death Valley, after the hottest decade on record. Even that isn’t changing enough minds.
So, what will it take? Focussing less on the deniers, learning to work with biases, alongside communities and expanding the green lobby as benefits spread would be a start.
Last week offered a clear example of the extent of the problem. Meeting California state officials to discuss out-of-control wildfires, US President Donald Trump was told global warming was making the situation worse. “It’ll start getting cooler, you just watch,” he said. The science suggests otherwise, came the reply from the secretary of the California Natural Resources Agency. “Well, I don’t think science knows, actually.” This isn’t a unique response, and suggests fact and experience aren’t enough.
Evidence from Australia, climate victim and perpetrator, is just as worrying. Last year, before a devastating bushfire season and a May election, an ABC poll suggested the environment had jumped to the number one concern for 29% of respondents, ahead of the economy. Still, voters backed an incumbent coalition that champions coal. Today, it is remarkable how little has changed after months of blazes that produced as much climate-damaging pollution as the world’s commercial aircraft fleet in a normal year. The government has left net-zero greenhouse gas emissions targets to states, focusses on new technologies instead of outright cuts, and wants a gas-fuelled recovery that heads in the wrong direction, as my colleague David Fickling has written.
Some communities are stepping up efforts, and conversations about how to adapt to and mitigate the new reality are more frequent. US Democrats’ Green New Deal, laid out last year, is ambitious; so, too, is Europe’s green recovery. And extreme events have changed some minds, as in the case of Frank Luntz, the pollster who had long helped the Republican party minimise the threat of climate change. Far more changes of heart are needed, though.
For years, global warming was seen as too distant, happening too slowly and as a problem for others. It didn’t feel urgent or personal, and was an unsolvable collective action problem. Much of that no longer applies. If reminders were needed, the coronavirus pandemic has shown just how swiftly a distant threat can become immediate. Still, public and political action hasn’t been galvanised.
Some of that is due to psychology. Humans have limited memories and adapt, so extreme events may become less noteworthy as they become more frequent. Research by Frances Moore at the University of California, Davis, and others published last year suggests that expectations are adjusted as anomalous temperatures become less remarkable. It isn’t yet clear if that extends to other extreme weather, but it’s not a comforting thought. More gravely, there is the increasingly partisan nature of the environment debate, after years of active fossil fuel industry lobbying. It feeds on our desire to protect the status quo and the social group we belong to. We avoid challenging our worldview even when we experience something inconsistent with what we hold to be true.

—Bloomberg