Yeah, But Are We Dead? | The Odyssey Online
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Health and Wellness

Yeah, But Are We Dead?

If I told you that we as a species are slowly killing ourselves everyday, what would you say?

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Yeah, But Are We Dead?
Bored Panda

Okay, now that I have your attention, I would like to go over a couple things that could potentially be the overall cause as to why humans don't want to listen to the clear facts as to what is going on with climate change.

One of the reasons is that we are human, and as humans, we tend to see the world in our own perspective. Usually in order for things to impact us and allow for humans to notice change, they must involve P.A.I.N. They must be Personal and the change must also be Abrupt. These things tend to have an impact on how we perceive things. “Bad things only happen to other people.” The change that we perceive must also be Immoral/Indecent and for almost everybody to notice a change, it must be Now. A lot of the things we hear about climate change involves things that are in the future. For humans that have been over saturated with hyperbolized media tend to not care about things that aren't happening now. Nobody cares if a celebrity couple will soon break up, they only care if they have broken up. People were so worried about Ebola when it had first arisen due to its 100% fatality rate at the time of its discovery and people wanted to do everything about it when the first case of Ebola popped up in the United States. The news made it seem as if Ebola was gonna be the next Bubonic plague before it even had a chance to migrate from Africa.

Another potential reason could be the fact that people are afraid of being outcasts to their own in-group. As a social animal, we evolved depending on our contemporaries to survive and even now as an evolved mammal, we depend on social interaction to help raise our young and help them develop language. Psychologist John Tooby stated “Our modern skulls house a stone aged mind.” People are so afraid to be the outcast they tend to conform to a “mob mentality” as to not shake the boat within their in-group. People will clearly create reasons as to not notice clear facts until it might be too late.

Another reason could be that human’s experience confirmation bias. That means that we as a species tend to find an article/news segment/newspaper column that may support what we think and use it as evidence to defend our belief, even if that evidence is false or incorrectly represented. This goes for the people that are denying that it even exists and try to use the fact that they are not a scientist to support their idea of not knowing whether they should believe what is going on with climate change. As much as I would love to sit here and agree with these people and say “hey! climate change is fake and we can continue to blast our air conditioners and continue to drive our Hummers because we’re not doing anything to the environment!” but the sad thing is that we are, and the rapid growth of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is creating these rapid changes to Earth. Bill Nye was being interviewed by NBC in a Meet The Press segment alongside Rep. Marsha Blackburn and she so insensitively said that Bill Nye was an engineer and her being in congress showed that they have no background on the matter and should not worry about it because they are not “climate scientists.” Bill Nye is a Mechanical Engineer and what that field of study is, is basically applied physics. Now with physics, you must know elements and their compounds so carbon dioxide, a big role in the warming up of our atmosphere, is something he has much knowledge about. It’s not about credentials and being able to act or speak on the matter, it’s about looking at clear facts! Denying clear scientific fact is almost as ignorant as denying that you're bleeding when you've been cut.

I am hopeful that the world will soon see that we must change to a more renewable source of energy and stop polluting this world with the gasses and chemicals we are now. Soon enough, climate change is going to catch up to us, and it will be too late for us to do anything. These types of effects are almost impossible to reverse and when people want to start doing things to change, a large number of people will have already been killed due to the monstrous changes inflicted upon us by our own doings.

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This article has not been reviewed by Odyssey HQ and solely reflects the ideas and opinions of the creator.
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