Ken Smith said:
The warming isn't very disputed. It is the cause that is being argued
about these days.
So, assuming no dispute and solid science, why is it that the term "Climate
Change" is becoming the preffered term these days??
We also don't all understand the biology of bird flu or the chemstry of
chemical weapons, nor the physics of atomic ones. On each of these we
have concluded that it is best to "play it safe".
"We"??
I am afraid that *I* do not know exactly who "we" are and I do not quite now
what "safe" is either, except for simple cause-effect things.
There are such things in life as real risk and imagined risk - the problem
is that the information processing part of the mind is heavily linked to the
emotion system (for speed and efficiency in front of large animals with
teeth) so the risk that invokes the most emotion is seen as the larger one
even when it is plainly ludicrous. The imagined risk is larger because it
has more emotional clout.
Behavourial scientists f.ex. have managed to sell more life insurances
covering the risk of getting killed in a terrorist attack on an airline than
the alternative insurance of dying on an airline (which of course cover
terrorism as well as obesity and heart disease i.e. *real* risks with high
probabilities).
Media these days feed on selling emotion, not information. The same does
politicians. Positive feedback is set up. I an few years boredom sets in,
emotion dissipates, and "the problem" will disappear. The "war on terror"
will go the way of "the war on drugs". "Global Warming" mutates into
"Climate Change" and then .... it disappears as no emotional mileage can be
gained from it.
I give it Five Years, Tops.
PS:
See Kahneman and Twersky on wikipedia (down now, of course).
