Global warming freak out

Last week, I had a global warming freak-out.

So being trained in statistics, I went to find a bigger sample of people. First I tried a straw poll of other parents at the school pickup waiting area revealed that most of them have had one too in the last 12 months too. Emily’s mum confessed to a nightmare about post-apocalyptic life in a bunker in a verdant Antarctica. James’s dad freaked out after reading an article about brown coal, and promptly called a solar company to get a quote on a rooftop PV array. On the spot, Emily’s mum asked James’s dad for the solar company’s number. Perhaps having young kids makes parents feel like we are not individuals, instead our kids are the tip of a genetic tendril stretching into the future. And in a +5°C world, we fear there’s not much of a future for them.

And then Sam’s Mum told us about her freak-out: that the smart meter recently installed on the outside of her bedroom wall was giving her brain cancer.

Then Lachie’s mum started talking about her sister’s anxiety about being tailgated by taxis.

All of a sudden, the conversation shifted into a very typical school pickup set of topics: rotating and apparently disconnected anecdotes about other peoples’ wacky anxieties and the equally wacky measures they employ to cope with them.

So the next day, I tried another experiment: I asked about global warming fears at the lunch table at work. I sat with about 10 men, all employed as infrastructure engineers, ranging in age from 22 to 60+ (I’m too polite to ask).

Once again, two people started to talk about their genuine freak-outs and subsequent sustainable/self-sufficient lifestyle measures, and then somebody shifted the pattern. This time, two programmers in their mid-30’s started joking about the potential threat to hops production and thus to the supply of BEER! Oh no save the BEER! they said, and led us onwards into stereotypical blokey alcohol and sport driven conversation.

On a data set of two, my working theory was this. Discussing global warming is like holding onto a wet eel - we can’t get a grip. Many people have a sense of unease, and will discuss fears and findings and scenarios one-to-one, but in a group there is always someone who will divert and unravel the conversation, and maybe the rest of us are all too happy to be released from thinking about it.

So I went looking for data point number three: A group of my old uni friends: several environmental science graduates now consulting to industries like mining or contaminated land, several doctors, a few engineers, a few biomedical scientists, a few others. All but two are parents of young kids. Once I told my freak-out story and opened the conversation, it was not derailed. They were all very sure that climate change is real, here now, and a big problem.  The enviro scientists kept producing stories about recent climate data, and how the models are surprisingly accurate. One of the doctors held our complete attention for 25 minutes talking on link between economic development, population health, and carbon output. We discussed drought and storms and the models for shifting weather patterns, food shortage, transport challenges, and the disproportionate political power of vested interests industries like mining and petrochemical energy. We shared what we knew about carbon capture and storage, energy generation and demand side management of fixed electricity loads, how cholera spreads after a natural disaster, and where our infrastructure and lifestyles are most vulnerable to gradual climate change, or larger more frequent catastropic weather events. Every one of us, in our professional life, had come across a reason to think very seriously about man-made climate change and what might be done, is being done, isn’t being done.

But in several hours of discussion we never touched on what all this might mean for our kids. It was just too scary, and too easy to give up hope.

In my view, the problem at the heart of the “climate debate” is this.

1. Climate scientists know that climate change is happening, due to human emissions of CO2. We know that the global climate system is a bit like a freight train: heavy and slow to start, but we’ve got the accelerator up full-bore, and just because we don’t know what the top line speed is or when it’s going to get there, we know that top line speed is
   a)    very bad for most life on this planet, and 
   b)   really very hard to slow down.
2. A small but increasing number of professionals are finding that their work touches on how climate change impacts on people. Actuaries calculating insurance risks need to take increased frequencies of ‘freak’ events. Botanists and zoologists are consistently discovering species shifting into new territories following climate change: Victorian alpine species are at risk from snow-less winters, and the ‘Cockroach Line’ has almost shifted from Canberra to as far south as Melbourne. A civil engineer spoke about how they’ve been redesigning our stormwater and sewerage systems for higher tides. and bigger floods from storms.
    
3. Psychologists have identified, and are starting to discuss, a new type of illness:
   Climate Anxiety.
   It’s particularly prevalent in certain demographics: late adolescents and young adults (whose brains, it turns out, are supremely adapted to thinking about ‘big picture’ issues like God and death and climate change); mothers of children under 5 (whose brains, it turns out, are triggered by pregnancy hormones to adapt to protecting their children and learning to manage daily life with the huge adjustment that the little one’s arrival entails); those with a history of anxiety issues (whose brains are flooded with anxiety neurotransmitters anyway!) and the very old (whose brains haven’t particularly been identified as changing, but whose thoughts are suddenly turning to God and death and the past that they’ve witnessed and the future of their bloodline and their loved ones).
4. Many of the rest of us don’t want to think about it. We just want to work, and get paid, and buy stuff hoping it will make us happy, and watch TV in the evenings so we don’t have to think. And we are the ones with jokes about beer, stories about taxis, thousands of ways of shutting down the conversation before that third tentative person can put their thoughts into words for the first time.

Here’s the thing. The freight train is getting faster. It’s about bloody time we start, and persist with, conversations about what to do next. Don't let others shut you down.

Imprinted like a baby chicken

When I was 14, a schoolfriend lived on a chicken farm. Her parents would get crates of day-old chicks from the commercial hatchery, 50,000 or 100,000 at a time, in trays of 100, stacks of 2000, delivered on one or two trucks. They would go into sheds with hanging automatic feeder dishes, water drips, and clean sawdust. There they would jostle and peck and grow and crap until they were 12 weeks old and 1.5kg each and still going "peep peep", wherupon other trucks would come, they would get packed into crates of 20, stacks of 160, and ten trucks, and off to the processing plant they would go. In a hot summer, 30% of the chooks would die on a 40 degree day. Otherwise, the yield was 90%.

A few times, my friend held a 'chicken throwing' party and sleepover, which for her parents meant cheap labour. Our job was to unload the day-old chicks into the big shed.

The thing is, day-old chicks have brains which are programmed to follow anything that moves and doesn't eat them and isn't another chicken. Specifically, gumboots. Or mother hens. But mostly gumboots. There isn't much that is funnier than being followed around a shed by 50,000 fluffy yellow pompoms.
By the time they have been left more or less alone in the shed for 3 weeks, they have forgotten their imprinting and don't flock to your gumboots.
 


Human brains have the same flock triggers in them, craving closeness and protection and benign authority.
The things we follow are only a little more sophisticated than gumboots. 

Our own parents and parent-like figures.
Charismatic dictators and celebrities.

Sexual partners, particularly your first one or first few (Take note, if you tell yourself you can have sex without attachment - your primitive brain attaches itself to your partner during sex and you can't stop it! So for the sake of your brain, don't shag someone if you don't mean it.)

In fact, our brains are imprinted by anyone who evokes a feeling of connection and trust.

I am following the gumboots of one particular man, just like a fluffy baby chicken.
He is off to bed right now and so am I.

Framing

 


I caught Victor in the office kitchen yesterday, as he was going into a meeting.

"Hey, can I just get a quick answer to a question?" I asked
"The answer is no" he quipped.
"Well then I'd better frame the question so that I get the answer I want" I said.
He looked confused.
"I was originally going to ask, can I pinch some of your project's equipment for a couple of days. Now I'm going to ask, do you mind if I pinch your project's equipment. Since you've said you don't mind, I guess I'd better go load it up on the trolley."

Ten seconds of silence.

"Alex, if your brain ever switches off, I reckon the earth's magnetic poles will swap over and all the birds will crash into the sea or something."

"Does that mean I can pinch the equipment?"
"Yeah alright. You've got a week and then I need it back."
"Excellent, thanks Victor, have fun in the meeting."


see. it's all in the framing.