Communicating Climate Change Controversy to Space Aliens
If you were a space alien visiting Earth, global warming would seem a strangely inflammatory topic. That’s because the controversy doesn’t really make sense until you understand the curious particularities of human psychology. Otherwise you’d be confused as to why an issue that at its core is purely scientific (is human activity warming the earth?) would be so contentious.
At the bottom of it, there’s just some simple unfeeling truth: Either the world is or isn’t warming, and if it is, then there’s some concrete fraction of that warming which results from human activity (somewhere inbetween zero and one hundred percent). So we might expect the debate between climate change believers and sceptics to be about science.
But instead, there’s strong evidence that disagreement about global warming mainly highlights how poorly humans are at being self-aware – how bad we are at noticing flaws...