When it comes to climate change, most of us are the Jim Carrey character in “Dumb and Dumber.”
As you may know even if you haven’t seen the movie, since it has become an internet meme, Carrey is told the odds of dating a girl are a million-to-one and responds gleefully: “So you’re telling me there’s a chance!”
Such cognitive dissonance is common in human brains, which don’t handle probability very well. It seem like we only have a couple of slots in our brain for judging the likelihood of something and it doesn’t really matter what the odds are in each slot. Million-to-one feels the same as 50/50.
So when we’re told there’s a million-to-one chance that the brutal heat wave baking a quarter of the Northern Hemisphere is a natural phenomenon, rather than one caused by 150 years of industrial pollution, deforestation and burning fossil fuels, our gleeful response is “So you’re telling me there’s a chance it’s not our fault!”
What a relief! We don’t have to feel guilty and we don’t have to change anything in our life because there’s a chance it’s due to sunspots or faulty temperature gauges or Ice Age rebound or something else! Woo-hoo!
That is a ham-handed way to say that despite legitimate science-y waffling of “it’s impossible to link any one event to climate change,” of course this latest example of a boiling Earth is due to climate change. Adding energy to a closed system causes change and we’ve been adding energy to the globe, by keeping it from escaping, since the Industrial Revolution began.
And as we’ve told for decades, it will get worse if we continue to channel our internal Jim Carrey and ignore the reality. Maybe enough triple-digit New England days will get it through our cognitive-dissonant heads and we’ll take action.
Maybe.
In my previous job, I and a co-worker had a sort of sort of Pat-and-Mike routine concerning the likelihood of winning a big lottery. (That reference, dating from vaudeville days, is not flattering toward Irish folks but such is life.)
I said that for any given person it was impossible to win the grand prize in Powerball. And I mean impossible, not just really unlikely – because in the real world, 292,000,000-to-one odds are equivalent to infinity-to-one. You, I told a colleague, are absolutely positively guaranteed to never win it.
On the other hand, my co-worker told that same colleague that his odds were actually 50/50 because “you either win, or you don’t.”
I mention this because the same routine can be applied to the tired question of “Did climate change cause this heat wave?”
The answer to that question is, of course, yes it did. Any idiot can see that.
There is, I suppose, a 292,000,000-to-one chance that this record heat over a quarter of the Northern Hemisphere would have happened even without humans, but that’s the same as infinity-to-one so it’s safe to say that it absolutely positively was caused by climate change.
Mentally, however, many of us lean toward the 50/50 thinking. We’re like the Jim Carrey character in “Dumb and Dumber”
