Don't even think about it : why our brains are wired to ignore climate change

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An Esquire Essential Book on Climate Change

From the founder of the Climate Outreach and Information Network, a groundbreaking take on the most urgent question of our time: Why, despite overwhelming scientific evidence, do we still ignore climate change?

"Please read this book, and think about it." --Bill Nye

Most of us recognize that climate change is real yet we do nothing to stop it. What is the psychological mechanism that allows us to know something is true but act as if it is not? George Marshall's search for the answers brings him face to face with Nobel Prize-winning psychologists and Texas Tea Party activists; the world's leading climate scientists and those who denounce them; liberal environmentalists and conservative evangelicals. What he discovers is that our values, assumptions, and prejudices can take on lives of their own, gaining authority as they are shared, dividing people in their wake.

With engaging stories and drawing on years of his own research, Marshall argues that the answers do not lie in the things that make us different, but rather in what we share: how our human brains are wired--our evolutionary origins, our perceptions of threats, our cognitive blind spots, our love of storytelling, our fear of death, and our deepest instincts to defend our family and tribe. Once we understand what excites, threatens, and motivates us, we can rethink climate change, for it is not an impossible problem. Rather, we can halt it if we make it our common purpose and common ground. In the end, Don't Even Think About It is both about climate change and about the qualities that make us human and how we can deal with the greatest challenge we have ever faced.

出版社周刊评论

"Why do the victims of flooding, drought, and severe storms become less willing to talk about climate change or even accept that it is real?" Environmentalist Marshall, founder of the Climate Outreach and Information Network, explores this and a host of other questions in an alternately enlightening, yet labored examination of the reasons people have difficulty accepting climate change, even when presented with mountains of evidence. He draws heavily upon interviews with scientists and policy makers, as well as with individuals who have faced the ravages of severe flood or drought, offering several reasons why we have a hard time accepting the reality of climate change. For one, we often believe what we want to believe: "if you are already inclined... to see climate change as dangerous, then it looks really dangerous. If you are not inclined that way, then it looks exaggerated." Moreover, climate change is generally framed as a finite challenge that can be resolved or overcome, like winning a military victory. Marshall concludes by pointing out that multiple interpretations of climate change contain the central reason we can ignore it: "these constructed narratives become so culturally specific that people who do not identify with [the narrative's underlying] values can reject the issue they explain." (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Kirkus评论

Readers seeking information on global warming will not find much here, but they would do well to dig into this lively, nonpolemical account of why the average person pays so little attention.Veteran British environmental activist Marshall, founder of the Climate Outreach and Information Network, travels the world interviewing climate change deniers as well as those working on the problem. His conclusions are unsettling, to say the least. Emotional stories always trump facts, and climate change lacks the inflammatory features of, say, abortion, atheism or gay marriage. Why has it provoked fierce opposition from a minority and indifference from the general public? Marshall lists three main reasons. 1) It lacks salience, or a demand for our immediate attention. In the Stone Age, threats were nearby and obvious. Our brains evolved to give high priority to proximitya nuclear power plant, an abortion clinicwhile distant threats are a hard sell. 2) It seems controversial to most observers even though (thanks to the media) one side may feature scientists and the other cranks. 3) It demands immediate sacrifices (lower living standards, tiresome regulations) to prevent a future disaster. President Barack Obamas speeches on the subject, while admirable and necessary, never include practical steps. Reversing global warming requires government action, so U.S. opponents are overwhelmingly conservative. Yet exceptions exist. Responding to an electricity shortfall after the Fukushima nuclear power disaster, the Japanese voluntarily cut power use and sweltered without air conditioning. After 9/11, Americans yearned to make a personal contribution as they did in wartime. The author closes with Some Personal and Highly Biased Ideas for Digging Our Way Out of This Hole.An insightful, often discouraging look at why climate control advocates have failed to get their message across and what they should do. Much of Marshalls advice is counterintuitive (e.g.,drop the apocalyptic rhetoric), but it rings true. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

《书目》(Booklist)书评

Every year that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) releases a report on global warming, the scientific consensus that mankind has played an irrefutable role in the crisis goes up a few more percentage points, with the May 2014 report putting this figure at 97 percent. Yet somehow a mobilized effort in worldwide industries to cut back on greenhouse-gas emissions never quite follows insistent calls to action. According to environmental-policy consultant Marshall, this may be because the human brain, with its built-in fight-or-flight cerebral hardware, simply isn't wired to quickly respond to gloomy, long-term predicaments. In 42 engaging, bite-size chapters, Marshall presents the psychological research demonstrating why climate change simply doesn't feel dangerous enough to justify action and how we can trick our brains into changing our sense of urgency about the problem. His work is a much-needed kick in the pants for policymakers, grassroots environmentalists, and the public to induce us to develop effective motivational tools to help us take action to face the reality of climate change before it's too late.--Hays, Carl Copyright 2010 Booklist

Choice 评论

Thousands of books deal with climate change. This book has a different approach. Marshall (founder, Climate Outreach and Information Network, http://www.climateoutreach.org.uk/) differs from other "concerned, well informed, liberal minded environmentalists" by talking with climate deniers, skeptics, and unconvinced persons (he offers distinct definitions for each) as a part of an analysis of how people form opinions about climate change. With clinical objectivity, sardonic wit, and sound bites, the author shows, in 41 short chapters, why people develop an aversion to the subject of global climate change and how approaches widely used by environmental campaigners can produce unintended results-including hostility. Almost all the chapters contain novel research results or insights. Collectively, they paint a chastening picture of subjectively driven thinking on all sides of this controversial issue. The last chapter provides dozens of capitalized slogans suggesting what environmental activists should do (e.g., "CREATE A HEROIC QUEST") and what to avoid (e.g., "DROP THE ECO-STUFF"). Selected references and data sources support the text. This book, which has no illustrations and does not rehash climate science, belongs on the desk of every environmental activist. Though it is very well written, its concentrated and sophisticated insights may be too advanced for undergraduates. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Informed general readers, graduate students, researchers/faculty, and professionals/practitioners. --Frank T. Manheim, George Mason University

1 Questions	p. 1
2 We'll Deal with That Lofty Stuff Some Other Day	p. 5
Why Disaster Victims Do Not Want to Talk About Climate Change
3 Speaking as a Layman	p. 11
Why We Think That Extreme Weather Shows We Were Right All Along
4 You Never Get to See the Whole Picture	p. 17
How the Tea Party Fails to Notice the Greatest Threat to Its Values
5 Polluting the Message	p. 22
How Science Becomes Infected with Social Meaning
6 The Jury of Our Peers	p. 26
How We Follow the People Around Us
7 The Power of the Mob	p. 33
How Bullies Hide in the Crowd
8 Through a Glass Darkly	p. 36
The Strange Mirror World of Climate Deniers
9 Inside the Elephant	p. 39
Why We Keep Searching for Enemies
10 The Two Brains	p. 46
Why We Are So Poorly Evolved to Deal with Climate Change
11 Familiar Yet Unimaginable	p. 52
Why Climate Change Does Not Feet Dangerous
12 Uncertain Long-Term Costs	p. 56
How Our Cognitive Biases Line Up Against Climate Change
13 Them, There, and Then	p. 59
How We Push Climate Change Far Away
14 Costing the Earth	p. 65
Why We Want to Cain the Whole World Yet Lose Our Lives
15 Certain About the Uncertainty	p. 72
How We Use Uncertainty as a Justification for Inaction
16 Paddling in the Pool of Worry	p. 77
How We Choose What to Ignore
17 Don't Even Talk About It!	p. 81
The Invisible Force Field of Climate Silence
18 The Non-Perfect Non-Storm	p. 91
Why We Think That Climate Change Is Impossibly Difficult
19 Cockroach Tours	p. 99
How Museums Struggle to Tell the Climate Story
20 Tell Me a Story	p. 105
Why Lies Can Be So Appealing
21 Powerful Words	p. 109
How the Words We Use Affect the Way We Feel
22 Communicator Trust	p. 116
Why the Messenger Is More Important than the Message
23 If They Don't Understand the Theory, Talk About It Over and Over and Over Again	p. 121
Why Climate Science Does Not Move People
24 Protect, Ban, Save, and Stop	p. 127
How Climate Change Became Environmentalist
25 Polarization	p. 135
Why Polar Bears Make It Harder to Accept Climate Change
26 Turn Off Your Lights or the Puppy Gets It	p. 138
How Doomsday Becomes Dullsville
27 Bright-siding	p. 145
The Dangers of Positive Dreams
28 Winning the Argument	p. 150
How a Scientific Discourse Turned into a Debating Slam
29 Two Billion Bystanders	p. 155
How Live Earth Tried and Failed to Build a Movement
30 Postcard from Hopenhagen	p. 159
How Climate Negotiations Keep Preparing for the Drama Yet to Come
31 Precedents and Presidents	p. 162
How Climate Policy Lost the Plot
32 Wellhead and Tailpipe	p. 168
Why We Keep Fueling the Fire We Want to Put Out
33 The Black Gooey Stuff	p. 175
Why Oil Companies Await Our Permission to Co Out of Business
34 Moral Imperatives	p. 182
How We Diffuse Responsibility for Climate Change
35 What Did You Do in the Great Climate War, Daddy?	p. 187
Why We Don't Really Care What Our Children Think
36 The Power of One	p. 192
How Climate Change Became Your Fault
37 Degrees of Separation	p. 198
How the Climate Experts Cope with What They Know
38 Intimations of Mortality	p. 205
Why the Future Goes Dark
39 From the Head to the Heart	p. 211
The Phony Division Between Science and Religion
40 Climate Conviction
What the Green Team Can Learn from the God Squad	p. 217
41 Why We Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change... And Why We Are Wired to Take Action	p. 226
42 In a Nutshell	p. 231
Some Personal and Highly Biased Ideas for Digging Our Way Out of This Hole
Four Degrees: Why This Book Is Important	p. 239
References, Sources, and Further Reading	p. 243
Acknowledgments	p. 249
Index	p. 251

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