To my mind, this is too vague an explanation. Why is it that far more people believe in fighting global warming than in fighting the ageing process? They both rest upon scientific premises. You may say that the causal thinkers interested in fighting global warming, managed to bring lots of social thinkers along with them, by using social mechanisms; but why did the anti-warmers manage that, when the anti-agers did not? Also, even if we just focus on causal thinkers, it’s far more common to deplore global warming than it is to deplore the ageing process.
Most people who campaign on global warming don’t do it because of the science. If you look at planetary boundaries for example it seems like the way we mess up the nitrogen cycle is a bigger environmental problem then global warming. Any explanation that tries to explain people fighting global warming with them believing in science or believing that protecting the environment is important has to explain why those people aren’t also trying to fix the nitrogen cycle.
You have serious people who try to speak about climate change instead of global warming to communicate that global warming isn’t the only environmental issue that’s important but in the public eye climate change is still mainly global warming. A bunch of things for which the IPCC sees less as 90% probability are also considered by most people who believe in fighting global warming as being certain.
There are many economic actors who have an interest in getting people worried about CO2 to market solar cells to them but there are no economic actors who have an interest in getting people interested in the nitrogen cycle.
I think a few things play into this specific case:
1. Global warming is about defending the status quo of nature from actions of people (keep temperature as is) whereas anti-aging is trying to change the state of nature.
2. Global warming results from pollution and there’s already a social narrative around pollution being bad. And pollution is quite simple to understand too.
3. Global warming can be viewed as a moral failing of mankind and that fits in within a lot of existing stories. (There are stories about the pursuit of eternal youth, but I think they tend to have the message that the search doesn’t end well).
Generally though, in this post I haven’t explored the interaction between the two realities. Things from causal reality necessarily feed into social reality, I don’t have a clear model of how yet.
To my mind, this is too vague an explanation. Why is it that far more people believe in fighting global warming than in fighting the ageing process? They both rest upon scientific premises. You may say that the causal thinkers interested in fighting global warming, managed to bring lots of social thinkers along with them, by using social mechanisms; but why did the anti-warmers manage that, when the anti-agers did not? Also, even if we just focus on causal thinkers, it’s far more common to deplore global warming than it is to deplore the ageing process.
Most people who campaign on global warming don’t do it because of the science. If you look at planetary boundaries for example it seems like the way we mess up the nitrogen cycle is a bigger environmental problem then global warming. Any explanation that tries to explain people fighting global warming with them believing in science or believing that protecting the environment is important has to explain why those people aren’t also trying to fix the nitrogen cycle.
You have serious people who try to speak about climate change instead of global warming to communicate that global warming isn’t the only environmental issue that’s important but in the public eye climate change is still mainly global warming. A bunch of things for which the IPCC sees less as 90% probability are also considered by most people who believe in fighting global warming as being certain.
There are many economic actors who have an interest in getting people worried about CO2 to market solar cells to them but there are no economic actors who have an interest in getting people interested in the nitrogen cycle.
I think a few things play into this specific case:
1. Global warming is about defending the status quo of nature from actions of people (keep temperature as is) whereas anti-aging is trying to change the state of nature.
2. Global warming results from pollution and there’s already a social narrative around pollution being bad. And pollution is quite simple to understand too.
3. Global warming can be viewed as a moral failing of mankind and that fits in within a lot of existing stories. (There are stories about the pursuit of eternal youth, but I think they tend to have the message that the search doesn’t end well).
Generally though, in this post I haven’t explored the interaction between the two realities. Things from causal reality necessarily feed into social reality, I don’t have a clear model of how yet.