Climate Change Baffles Brains

We have now sunk to a depth where the restatement of the obvious is the duty of intelligent men. George Orwell’s words are worth repeating as climate-warming alarmists promote doomsday scenarios that have no basis in science. L. Rowand Archer examines the lie of global warming—and the motivations for it—in this treatise that exposes the socialist agenda and fear mongering of the liberal left. Lost in the propaganda is the fact that man-made CO2 emissions have greened Earth, transforming some former desert regions into verdant oases of greenery, and contributing to record crop yields. Instead of demonizing CO2, we should be praising CO2 for helping to feed the world. Because weather is familiar to all, it seems that everyone has a theory about what causes climate change, and that makes it difficult to argue rationally about the real science behind climate change. This book is intended to provide a nontechnical understanding of climate skepticism as argued by over 300 knowledgeable authors in their fields who question the notion that humankind is the major influence of climate change. Get real answers to what is really happening in Climate Change Baffles Brains.

The director of the Climate Outreach and Information Network explores the psychological mechanism that enables people to ignore the dangers of climate change, using sidebars, cartoons and engaging stories from his years of research to reveal how humans are wired to primarily respond to visible threats.

A deeply reported, eye-opening book about climate change, our brains, and the weight of nature on us all. The march of climate change is stunning and vicious, with rising seas, extreme weather, and oppressive heat blanketing the globe. But its effects on our very brains constitute a public-health crisis that has gone largely unreported. Based on seven years of research, this book by the award-winning journalist and trained neuroscientist Clayton Page Aldern, synthesizes the emerging neuroscience, psychology, and behavioral economics of global warming and brain health. A masterpiece of literary journalism, this book shows readers how a changing environment is changing us today, from the inside out. Aldern calls it the weight of nature. Hotter temperatures make it harder to think clearly and problem-solve. They increase the chance of impulsive violence. Immigration judges are more likely to reject asylum applications on hotter days. Umpires, to miss calls. Air pollution, heatwaves, and hurricanes can warp and wear on memory, language, and sensory systems; wildfires seed PTSD. And climate-fueled ecosystem changes extend the reach of brain-disease carriers like mosquitos, brain-eating amoebas, and the bats that brought us the mental fog of long COVID. How we feel about climate change matters deeply; but this is a book about much more than climate anxiety. As Aldern richly details, it is about the profound, direct action of global warming on our brains and behavior—and the most startling portrait yet of unforeseen environmental influences on our minds. From farms in the San Joaquin Valley and public schools across the United States to communities in Norway’s Arctic, the Micronesian islands, and the French Alps, this book is an unprecedented portrait of a global crisis we thought we understood.

A neurosurgeon explores how our tendency to prioritize short-term consumer pleasures spurs climate change, but also how the brain’s amazing capacity for flexibility can—and likely will—enable us to prioritize the long-term survival of humanity. Increasingly politicians, activists, media figures, and the public at large agree that climate change is an urgent problem. Yet that sense of urgency rarely translates into serious remedies. If we believe the climate crisis is real, why is it so difficult to change our behavior and our consumer tendencies? Minding the Climate investigates this problem in the neuroscience of decision-making. In particular, Ann-Christine Duhaime, MD, points to the evolution of the human brain during eons of resource scarcity. Understandably, the brain adapted to prioritize short-term survival over more uncertain long-term outcomes. But the resulting behavioral architecture is poorly suited to the present, when scarcity is a lesser concern and slow-moving, novel challenges like environmental issues present the greatest danger. Duhaime details how even our acknowledged best interests are thwarted by the brain’s reward system: if a behavior isn’t perceived as immediately beneficial, we probably won’t do it—never mind that we “know” we should. This is what happens when we lament climate change while indulging the short-term consumer satisfactions that ensure the disaster will continue. Luckily, we can sway our brains, and those of others, to alter our behaviors. Duhaime describes concrete, achievable interventions that have been shown to encourage our neurological circuits to embrace new rewards. Such small, incremental steps that individuals take, whether in their roles as consumers, in the workplace, or in leadership positions, are necessary to mitigate climate change. The more we understand how our tendencies can be overridden by our brain’s capacity to adapt, Duhaime argues, the more likely we are to have a future.

The book to spark action on the defining challenge of our time In our post-truth world, there’s only one place to turn to if we want to live in reality: science. And the research on climate change is clear: It’s real, it threatens us all, and human activity is the primary cause. This essential handbook dismantles all the most pernicious misunderstandings spread by deniers and replaces them with the truth. Faced with an imperiled planet that we must urgently work to save, we don’t have time for anything else.

Global climate change policy has failed us all, but what is the reasoning that underlies this failure? Why are some people more disposed to reflect on confounding issues like climate change, recognise the danger, seek a solution, and act accordingly, more than others? This book is concerned with how we think and act in response to climate change. In particular, faced with deep uncertainty and the multifaceted complexities that characterise the climate change conundrum, how the various actors and institutions involved in the policymaking process make decisions that both aid and impede in the design and implementation of climate change policy. This book focuses on how these actors and institutions frame and use the knowledge available – under conditions of competing ideologies and interests – and synthesise it to form often-disparate mental models, or worldviews, that inspire them to become firm advocates of meaningful climate change action or indeed, sceptics that continue to downplay the threat, and hence the need for urgency. By exploring how we think about climate change and the disparate mental models we hold as a result, this book explores why humankind has thus far failed in its endeavours to solve the climate change problem. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of climate change, environmental policy and environmental psychology.

One of the most shocking realizations of all time has slowly been dawning on us: the earth's climate does great flip-flops every few thousand years, and with breathtaking speed. In just a few years, the climate suddenly cools worldwide. With only half the rainfall, severe dust storms whirl across vast areas. Lightning strikes ignite giant forest fires. For most mammals, including our ancestors, populations crash. Our ancestors lived through hundreds of such abrupt episodes since the more gradual Ice Ages began two and a half million years ago—but abrupt cooling produced a population bottleneck each time, one that eliminated most of their relatives. We are the improbable descendants of those who survived—and later thrived. William H. Calvin's marvelous A Brain for All Seasons argues that such cycles of cool, crash, and burn powered the pump for the enormous increase in brain size and complexity in human beings. Driven by the imperative to adapt within a generation to "whiplash" climate changes where only grass did well for a while, our ancestors learned to cooperate and innovate in hunting large grazing animals. Calvin's book is structured as a travelogue that takes us around the globe and back in time. Beginning at Darwin's home in England, Calvin sits under an oak tree and muses on what controls the speed of evolutionary "progress." The Kalahari desert and the Sterkfontein caves in South Africa serve as the backdrop for a discussion of our ancestors' changing diets. A drought-shrunken lake in Kenya shows how grassy mudflats become great magnets for grazing animals. And in Copenhagen, we learn what ice cores have told us about abrupt jumps in past climates. Perhaps the most dramatic discovery of all, though, awaits us as we fly with Calvin over the Gulf Stream and Greenland: global warming caused by human-made pollution could paradoxically trigger another sudden episode of global cooling. Because of the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the oceanic "conveyor belt" that sends warmer waters into the North Atlantic could abruptly shut down. If that happens again, much of the Earth could be plunged into a deep chill within a few years. Europe would become as cold and dry as Siberia. Agriculture could not adapt quickly enough to avoid worldwide famines and wars over the dwindling food supplies—a crash from which it would take us many centuries to recover. With this warning, Calvin connects us directly to evolution and the surprises it holds. Highly illustrated, conversational, and learned, A Brain for All Seasons is a fascinating view of where we came from, and where we're going.

The #1 international bestseller on climate change that’s been endorsed by policy makers, scientists, writers, and energy executives around the world. Tim Flannery’s The Weather Makers contributed in bringing the topic of global warming to worldwide prominence. For the first time, a scientist provided an accessible and comprehensive account of the history, current status, and future impact of climate change, writing what has been acclaimed by reviewers everywhere as the definitive book on global warming. With one out of every five living things on this planet committed to extinction by the levels of greenhouse gases that will accumulate in the next few decades, we are reaching a global climatic tipping point. The Weather Makers is both an urgent warning and a call to arms, outlining the history of climate change, how it will unfold over the next century, and what we can do to prevent a cataclysmic future. Originally somewhat of a global warming skeptic, Tim Flannery spent several years researching the topic and offers a connect-the-dots approach for a reading public who has received patchy or misleading information on the subject. Pulling on his expertise as a scientist to discuss climate change from a historical perspective, Flannery also explains how climate change is interconnected across the planet. This edition includes a new afterword by the author. “An authoritative, scientifically accurate book on global warming that sparkles with life, clarity, and intelligence.” —The Washington Post