Veteran environmental reporter Dave Roberts gives us some bad news — No country on Earth is taking the 2 degree climate target seriously (Vox, October 4, 2016).
Before I get into this, I want to point out that DOTE is the only website on Earth (to my knowledge) which has consistently and insistently predicted the depressing outcome Roberts is so concerned about.
You would think such insight would count for something, but on this planet, among Homo sapiens, it basically counts for nothing. Which tells you something right there.
OK, here we go.
One of the morbidly fascinating aspects of climate change is how much cognitive dissonance it generates, in individuals and nations alike.
'Cognitive dissonance' is a Flatland term which doesn't get to the bottom of things. I'll make a few remarks about that below.
The more you understand the brutal logic of climate change — what it could mean, the effort necessary to forestall it — the more the intensity of the situation seems out of whack with the workaday routines of day-to-day life.
It’s a species-level emergency, but almost no one is acting like it is. And it’s very, very difficult to be the only one acting like there’s an emergency, especially when the emergency is abstract and science-derived, grasped primarily by the intellect.
This psychological schism is true for individuals, and it’s true for nations.
Generalizing, we might conclude that this so-called "psychological schism" is true for humans.
Take the Paris climate agreement.
In Paris, in 2015, the countries of the world agreed (again) on the moral imperative to hold the rise in global average temperature to under 2 degrees Celsius, and to pursue "efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 degrees." To date, 62 countries, including the United States, China, and India, have ratified the agreement.
Are any of the countries that signed the Paris agreement taking the actions necessary to achieve that target?
No. The US is not. Nor is the world as a whole.
The actions necessary to hold to 2 degrees, much less 1.5 degrees, are simply outside the bounds of conventional politics in most countries.
Anyone who proposed them would sound crazy, like they were proposing, I don’t know, a war or something.
So we say 2 degrees is unacceptable. But we don’t act like it is.
There it is.
This cognitive dissonance is brought home yet again in a new report from Oil Change International (in collaboration with a bunch of green groups). It’s about fossil fuels and how much of them we can afford to dig up and burn, if we’re serious about what we said in Paris. It’s mostly simple math, but the implications are vast and unsettling.
Let’s start from the beginning...
Let's not start from the beginning and pretend we did. You can read the Roberts article if you want the details.
In the context of the Paris agreement, it boils down to this observation, repeated from above.
So we say 2 degrees is unacceptable. But we don’t act like it is.
In short, and in political terms, humans are saying one thing and doing another.
Why anyone would be surprised by this is beyond me.
That is not cognitive dissonance (or here).
Cognitive dissonance refers to a situation involving conflicting attitudes, beliefs or behaviors. This produces a feeling of discomfort leading to an alteration in one of the attitudes, beliefs or behaviors to reduce the discomfort and restore balance etc.
We are talking about unalterable human behaviors here (see below). And in so far as attitudes and beliefs also arise in the unconscious, these are almost always unalterable as well (there are rare exceptions).
Festinger's (1957) cognitive dissonance theory suggests that we have an inner drive to hold all our attitudes and beliefs in harmony and avoid disharmony (or dissonance) ... [which] can give rise to irrational and sometimes maladaptive behavior.
According to Festinger, we hold many cognitions about the world and ourselves; when they clash, a discrepancy is evoked, resulting in a state of tension... As the experience of dissonance is unpleasant, we are motivated to reduce or eliminate it, and achieve consonance (i.e. agreement).
Where Festinger would say humans have a cognitive need to produce consistency in attitudes and beliefs, I would say that humans have a need to deceive themselves to produce acceptable psychological outcomes. These are not the same thing, though their are superficial similarities.
The instinctual drives which give rise to these large-scale human behaviors (i.e., burning fossil fuels to fuel global civilization) exist in the unconscious, which is not accessible to awareness. As such, those motivations and the accompanying behaviors are fixed. If there is merely a human cognitive drive to produce consistency in beliefs, attitudes and behaviors, any outcome is possible. But as we see in this climate example, that's patently not the case.
In the climate case, some humans have recognized that these behaviors constitute a longer term existential threat to humanity. These behaviors have therefore become unacceptable in consciousness. But unconscious motivations (instincts) drive those behaviors, whether we consciously believe they are acceptable or not.
In keeping with how the human animal works, it becomes necessary to put a positive, optimistic spin on future behaviors (on our future "intentions"). Thus we resolve our "cognitive dissonance", but we do so to no effect. Humans can pretend they control their destiny and effectively defuse (filter) the threat. In short, they have successfully deceived themselves. That's what the Paris Agreement accomplished psychologically, and that's all it accomplished.
Subsequent human actions have simply born out what I've said here. With respect to the climate, humans are saying one thing and doing another, and that was predictable all along.
Hi all,
yes, DOTE is the only place one can find consistent and insistent predicament of human behaviour. And well explained why is it so.
Some information few might find useful. I provided (they asked me!) several interviews regarding ratification of Paris treaty. Basically I said its nice politicians said cliamte change is a problem worth solving (what an achievment!), but quickly pointed out words are far from actions.
Surely, flatlanders will point out MB (motivated bullshit) about energy efficient LED lights, decling carbon and energy intensity od GDP, rapidly declining price of solar/wind power, hybrid ships, elecric batteries/cars, slowing population growth and "peak child" (hi Hans Rosling!), carbon taxes increasingly accepted e.g. in Canada, declining coal emissions... did I forget someting?
But there it goes - "expert discussion" rages on, with few people paying attention, living their instinct driven unconscious shallow lives, being happy with more money for less work, pretty girlfriend, even more pretty lover, happy with kids, happy with cheap travelling, happy with friends they can use for something, idiotic movies and TV series, and, being unhappy with the opposite.
But yes, we will surely solve climate change some day, like tomorrow!
Best,
Alex
Posted by: Alexander Ač | 10/12/2016 at 10:06 AM