Ecologist Enric Sala’s Portrayal of His Awakening regarding Global Warming — Illustrates Why We Are Not Going to Do anything Effective to Ameliorate It

© 2014 Peter Free

 

02 July 2014

 

 

Citation

 

Enric Sala, What visiting Greenland taught me about climate change, World Economic Forum (02 July 2014)

 

 

The — “I’m not gonna get off my ass, until it’s charred and useless” — rule of human behavior

 

Dr. Enric Sala, an ecologist with National Geographic, wrote a penetratingly honest essay about the wakeup call that a helicopter flight over one of Greenland’s dying glaciers inspired in him:

 

 

Twenty kilometres in 20 years.

 

That’s how much the Ilulissat glacier has retreated as this mighty, flowing river of ice crumbles into the ocean.

 

I did not fully realize what this meant until we flew over the Ilulissat icefjord. It takes 10 minutes for the helicopter to fly over the amount of ice that has been lost because of global warming – in this glacier alone.

 

The speed at which the glacier moves has doubled relative to that in 1998.

 

My scientist brain, accustomed to working with numbers and large scales, had a hard time absorbing this information.

 

If I was rationally aware of the consequences of global warming from scientific reports before, now I felt it emotionally.

 

Bob Corell . . . made us simulate international negotiations to try and agree on bolder targets for carbon emission reductions.

 

After our negotiations we came up with what we thought were improvements on the status quo.

 

Bob entered the new agreed dates and reduction targets in his model.  [F]eeling like wise world leaders, we were expecting conspicuous reductions in global warming trends and a stabilization of the average global temperature.

 

Our eyes were fixed on the screen. Nothing happened.

 

Even a scientist like me, with no doubts about the consequences of global warming, was in shock.

 

© 2014 Enric Sala, What visiting Greenland taught me about climate change, World Economic Forum (02 July 2014) (extracts)

 

 

The Monkey Brain Effect

 

Evolution has not prepared us to grasp immense numbers and long periods.  We habitually assume that:

 

(a) today will be similar to yesterday

 

and that

 

(b) when we decide to get off the Couch of Sloth, something good will almost automatically happen, when we put our determined paws to work.

 

This blindness to Reality is caused by being simultaneously self-centered and an atomic-sized part of an agglomeration of similarly short-sighted beings.

 

The accumulated mass of our greedy monkey brains is (invisibly) overwhelming and our willingness to sacrifice, less than minute.

 

 

The moral? — Think “tiny, greedy brain” when trying to forecast human behavior in regard to the Tragedy of the Commons

 

The failure of future-oriented human acuity is why the Dr. Correll’s computer model did not react at all to the Monkey Clan’s inserted warming offsets.  What we are willing to give up on individual and societal bases are ultimately insignificant parts of our population mass’s physical effects on the planet.

 

That Dr. Sala did not recognize this until he experienced his Greenland helicopter flight, says it all.  One can imagine how even more blind the rest of us are.