Change your mind on Global Warming?

By James Coleman
Sun contributor
A “mind set” is a short circuit of a powerful human capacity. When I hear someone talk about “tree huggers,” I don’t expect to have a meaningful conversation about whether there is global warming or not. My information is useless to this person whose mind is, as we say, “made up,” or finished thinking and considering.

I run into this “made-upness” when I talk to my children about credit card debt. The discussion is over before it starts, even though, in the end, the rules of compound interest will enforce themselves on these people about whom I care. The mindset that they must participate in America’s binge of debt is too strong for reason, or so it seems. My thesis is that our state of denial about the science of global warming is similar; we are accumulating debt in the form of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The interest is compounding, yet denial is the easiest and most acceptable response for the same reasons that people are reluctant to face up to credit card debt. There’s a whiff of Puritanism and an encouragement of responsibility attached, which, the argument goes, life right now is too stressful to permit.
Let’s try another example of a “mind set.” Everyone experiences or practices the highway problem of following too closely. At a mile a minute or more, the two-tenths of a second reaction time when someone’s brake lights come on in front of you ensures that you will cover 20 feet before you apply your brakes. If you are driving a large heavy vehicle, and the one in front of you is smaller and lighter, there can be a further difference in stopping distance of 40 feet. The result is that the vehicle in front of you can stop 60 feet before you can, with obvious results. Two-tenths of a second is an optimum reaction time. Often, it takes a full second to react, or 88 feet. The math is certain, yet drivers characteristically defy the laws of momentum and physics to save four-tenths of a second.
Only a “mind-set” of NASCAR proportions — “I am Dale Earnhardt reincarnated” — can explain the denial of reality in evidence on our roads, even without factoring in eating, applying make-up, and/or cell phoning. Why risk massive personal injury and property damage to save tenths of a second? A desire to test air bags? Defiance of a “police state?”
In this era of mind-sets and quick dismissal of scientific consensus, as long as someone is willing to tell us what we want to hear, a problem such as a threat to the planet which requires attention to scientific fact and a commitment to policies without an immediate tangible result seems unlikely to be addressed. We won’t do what we need to do, anymore than we will back off on the highway, or stop spending on our cards.
The fate of the planet may seem remote as one enjoys the summer ambience of Leelanau County. Tailgaters and plastic problems have been left behind, and all seems forgiven as one samples a cold one at Art’s, or just plants hot feet into the wet sand. “Look into the pewter pot/ to see the world as the world’s not,” the poet A.E. Housman tells us, “and faith, ‘tis pleasant till ‘tis past:/ the mischief is that ‘twill not last.” I’m not going to close with facts and figures. That won’t change your mind anyway. One fellow said to me, “I’m not going to let Al Gore tell me when to flip the light switch,“ and I believe him. Read Elizabeth Kolbert’s Field Notes from a Catastrophe, and if you don’t feel that we live in threatened beauty, then I’ll expect you in the rearview mirror, defying the laws of physics, which is your right.