One of the huge problems with the climate and ecological crisis, is the vast majority of people, don't really understand what it means at all. Those who do understand the problem, often don't get how little most people really grasp the problem.
https://twitter.com/ClimateHuman/status/1434631972547010561
A very long time ago, I realised the real problem here was one of perception. One of the huge and misleading myths of our culture is that everyone sees things in a similar way, just some don't understand it as well as other people do.
This whole idea that people broadly see things in the same way, and it is just the degree of understanding, which varies is profoundly mistaken. It's not that some people just don't quite get it, but a lot have profoundly false views about the world we live in.
As I've often said, thinking is like following a set of directions. If when you are thinking and reasoning, you take a wrong turn early on, you will end up in an entirely different direction and region than you were supposed to be heading.
Imagine you are supposed to be going somewhere about a 100 miles away. That you come to a major road that travels north to south and that instead of heading north where, you accidentally turn south. You will be heading in completely the wrong direction.
This is how people get lost. If they have taken a wrong turning without realising, they will get hopelessly lost and disorientated.
Unfortunately, with reasoning, when a lot of people take a wrong turn with their thinking, they never realise this, and they create a whole alternate reality, totally detached from actual reality. Where no one notices, because all those they know have the same false beliefs.
It isn't that many, or most people just don't quite get the climate and ecological emergency, they live in a wholly different reality, where this problem just doesn't exist.
A simple example of this are average temperature rises. People see talk about a 2C, 3C or 4C temperature rise, and most people say, what's the big deal? This is because they have no concept of average temperatures.
The vast majority of people only understand weather. They have no idea what climate is. So they mistakenly think a 3C rise in global average temperatures, will just mean on a given day, it will be 22C instead of 19C, and think what is the big deal?
It seems absurd to anyone that understands it. But they don't realise that the vast majority of people have no idea what the climate is, and why it matters. They have never stopped for one moment in their whole life to consider what the difference between weather and climate is.
This is why the stupid climate change denier meme, "the climate is always changing", has so much traction. Because most people don't understand the difference between weather and climate, and so they mistakenly think the climate changes every day, every hour.
In surveys, opinion polls, they will ask people what they think or believe about climate change. It is an absurd question, when the vast majority of people don't even know what is meant by the climate, let alone what a change in it actually means.
As someone who is not only a graduate in ecology, but who actually thinks ecologically, I am painfully aware of how few people even know what ecological thinking is, let alone what it means to see things ecologically.
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