It's bigger than that, of course, but a lot of the same thinking is involved, it's just more widespread because most people have more than a merely intellectual investment. Part of it, I think, is that people still see the destruction as something far off and distant that may not occur in their life time and against which they'll be able to take effective measures with minor difficulty even if it does. Meanwhile the super-cyclones proliferate, the flooding increases and the northern hemisphere experiences one of the most snowcovered winters on record while skeptics shout, "Look! Lots of snow! We TOLD you it's not getting hotter!" Never mind that heavier precipitation (which includes snow in the winter) as more ocean water evaporates in the summer is one of the predictions of global warming models. There's a lot of indulgent thinking on both sides that alternative energy will provide some magic bullet preventing catastrophe, because most people don't truly grasp the kind of inertia involved in large fundamental changes to global climate (most people seem to think the holeS in the ozone layer are ancient history, but that couldn't be farther from the truth. Then there's the school of thought that doesn't WANT to think about it because there's so little real push to change anything and current impacts are already serious, inevitable ones likely dire.

More than anything though I think the sad truth is that a lot of people ARE invested in denial, for whatever reason, and when people convince themselves of something, whether or not it's true, it can be hard to change their minds. I guess about a year ago someone (I want to say Silje, but it may have been Camilla) posted a thread that linked a couple studies indicating that the reasons we take positions are often a lot more arbitrary than most of us realize, and the more arbitrary they are the MORE tightly we cling to them. People don't like admitting error, and the longer and louder they declare something the more reluctant they usually are to say they were wrong. That's true generally, but especially when it risks ceding influence and power to an opposing group they really really loathe.

Unfortunately, that often means it takes a truly catastrophic event to crack that thick hard shell. In the '30s Western democracies were so traumatized by the 35 million (the equivalent of 150 million today) slain by bullets and disease in the Great War that they were committed to ever revisiting such horrors by the simple expedient of never again fighting a war. So we watched impassively as the Nazis gobbled up Czechoslovakia and Austria and the Japanese slaughtered their way through China, and only the invasion of Poland in Europe and Pearl Harbor in the States convinced the Allies inaction meant oblivion. That's probably what it will take now, too, because any real change in our future will require painful changes in our present. I just hope the required sacrifice is not too high, and that the damage already done but lurking in the future for decades is not too great.

Oh, and I still intensely dislike the term "climate change" because I consider it part of the problem; it's a focus group phrase that polled the best with audiences when Frank Luntz was looking for less frightening terms for the intimidating term "global warming". Calling it climate change, the focus group revealed, made it far more innocuous for people; after all, the weather (and that's the same as climate, right? ) is changing all the time, changes every season, and that's not so dangerous, so this climate change stuff must be no big deal; we'll just make a few minor adaptations and keep on truckin'. It's a natural cycle; the ice ages changed climate, too, but gradually over thousands of years with plenty of time for us to deal with the effects. For my money we should call global warming what it is, and if many of the effects involve a lot more than simply warmer atmospheric temperatures, well, maybe we should be talking about that more, too.