Why do so many people ignore major threats like climate change?

Why do so many people ignore major threats like climate change?


Earlier last month, the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service announced that Earth’s average temperature in 2024 had been on average 1.5 degrees C above pre-industrial levels. This was the major threshold established in the 2015 Paris climate accord as a dangerous milestone for our species, in which temperatures are so hot, that collapse of major ocean and atmospheric systems and mass extinctions follow. Was this headline news? The biggest story of the year? The source of mass protests?

Quite to the contrary, it has already been swept under the rug in the public’s consciousness.

Yet the EU’s announcement did not occur in a vacuum: Scientists have warned of rising temperatures for decades, and 2024 alone saw climate change-fueled natural disasters from unprecedented heat waves in the Southwest to powerful hurricanes in the Southeast. Yet despite these calamities, millions of people voted for a president whose policies experts warn will worsen climate change. It raises a provocative question: Why do people find it so difficult to psychologically grasp the reality of human-caused climate change?

According to Dr. Debra J. Davidson, a professor of environmental sociology at the University of Alberta, it has to do with a feeling of psychological distance from the problem.

“For too long now, scientific and media communications have presented the subject of climate change in ways that have failed to trigger an adequate threat warning among readers and viewers, and have also failed to motivate a sense of personal responsibility to respond,” Davidson explained. Instead climate change is frequently depicted in the abstract, as an extremely complicated scientific process, and this causes many readers to feel remote from the consequences.

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