David "Climate Nuremberg" Roberts: "For a given effect — a fire, a flood, a dead forest — climate change is almost always too distal a cause to make a visceral impression on us. We’re just not built to pay heed to those 1 percent margins"

Did climate change ’cause’ the Colorado wildfires? | Grist

One can distinguish between distal causes by their proximity to effects. Say the drought made the fires 50 percent more likely than average June conditions in Colorado. (I’m just pulling these numbers out of my ass to illustrate a point.) Climate change maybe only made the fires 1 percent more likely. As a cause, it is more distal than the drought. And there are probably causes even more distal than climate change. Maybe the exact tilt of the earth’s axis this June made the fires 0.0001 percent more likely. Maybe the location of a particular proton during the Big Bang made them 0.000000000000000001 percent more likely. You get the point.

...When we ask the question like that, we start to see why climate is such a wicked problem. Human beings, by virtue of their evolution, physiology, and socialization, are designed to heed causes within a particular range between proximate and distal. If I find my kid next to an overturned glass and a puddle of milk and ask him why the milk is spilled, I don’t care about the neurons firing and the muscles contracting. That’s too proximate. I don’t care about humans evolving with poor peripheral vision. That’s too distal. I care about my kid reaching for it and knocking it over. That’s not the only level of causal explanation that is correct, but it’s the level of causal explanation that is most meaningful to me.

For a given effect — a fire, a flood, a dead forest — climate change is almost always too distal a cause to make a visceral impression on us. We’re just not built to pay heed to those 1 percent margins. It’s too abstract. The problem is, wildfires being 1 percent more likely averaged over the whole globe actually means a lot more fires, a lot more damage, loss, and human suffering. Part of managing the Anthropocene is finding ways of making distal causes visceral, giving them a bigger role in our thinking and institutions.