Of course glorified savannah monkeys struggle with climate change

We could use a bit more compassion and a little less blame

The word “unprecedented” been drained of all impact through overuse. Which is annoying when you need it to describe something that genuinely stretches human understanding because it’s just unlike anything that has come before.

Climate change is genuinely unprecedented. 

For an ape species to become so successful we accidentally altered the composition of the planet’s atmosphere is a wholly novel type of problem.

Naturally it’s disorienting. Nothing about it happens on a scale that makes sense to us. 

Our tiny little hominid brains, evolved to survive alongside a few dozen of our close relatives on the edge of an African savannah, are almost comically ill-suited to the task of dealing with it. 

That we’ve been able to identify and conceptualize the problem at all is already a huge complement to our single greatest achievement on this planet: the development of science. 

But nothing about our societies, about our political systems, our social norms, our urbanization patterns, our habits of economic organization, nothing about anything about us is set up to confront a problem on the scale and with the characteristics of climate change. 

Take something like AMOC-collapse — the possibility that melting the Greenland ice shelf will bring what we used to call the Gulf Stream sputtering to a halt, leaving Northern Europe with Newfoundland-style weather. This is one of the scarier tipping points we’re flirting with. And some scientists think AMOC-collapse could become irreversible within 30 years. 

The word “collapse” makes it sound like an event.

In fact, researchers reckon it might take 100 years to play out. 

In planetary terms, that’s insanely fast. But individually to us, that is too slow for the word “collapse” to apply.

Just the time lags dividing cause from effect are deeply counterintuitive.

“YOU NEED TO RUN RIGHT NOW OR THAT TIGER IS GOING TO EAT YOU” is the kind of cause-and-effect lag our brains evolved to deal with. 

“Run now or a tiger will start chasing you in 30 years and may eat your great grandchildren in 130 years with a probability of 0.5982 +/- 0.1373 at the 95% confidence interval?” 

Not so much. 

Our systems of government aren’t set up to deal with planetary-scale, centuries-in-the-making disasters.

Our minds are terrible at intuiting the kind of probabilistic reasoning needed to think intelligently about climate change. 

Let’s cut the species some slack: we face an exceptionally confusing, genuinely unprecedented foe whose threat we can only approximate probabilistically. 

We’re not responding to it very intelligently, obviously, but we are responding to it, or trying to respond to it, with the tools that our culture puts at our disposal. 

Of course we’re making a lot of dumb mistakes. Naturally there are a lot of false starts. It goes without saying we’ve been thrown off balance: we’re glorified savannah monkeys, it’s a miracle we’ve gotten as far as we have. 

Collectively we’re slowly, awkwardly groping our way towards a more reasonable response to a problem we’re absurdly ill-matched to. It takes some self-compassion to understand we’re doing as well, no better, than anyone had any right to expect. And, in the end, shouldn’t we be rooting for our team?

I know I am…