What's more important, climate change or gay rights?

NO ONE seems to care about the upcoming attack on the World Trade Center site. Why? Because it won't involve villains with box cutters. Instead, it will involve melting ice sheets that swell the oceans and turn that particular block of lower Manhattan into an aquarium.

The odds of this happening in the next few decades are better than the odds that a disgruntled Saudi will sneak onto an airplane and detonate a shoe bomb. And yet our government will spend billions of dollars this year to prevent global terrorism and ... well, essentially nothing to prevent global warming.

Why are we less worried about the more likely disaster? Because the human brain evolved to respond to threats that have four features -- features that terrorism has and that global warming lacks.

First, global warming lacks a mustache. No, really. We are social mammals whose brains are highly specialized for thinking about others. Understanding what others are up to -- what they know and want, what they are doing and planning -- has been so crucial to the survival of our species that our brains have developed an obsession with all things human. We think about people and their intentions; talk about them; look for and remember them.

That's why we worry more about anthrax (with an annual death toll of roughly zero) than influenza (with an annual death toll of a quarter-million to a half-million people). Influenza is a natural accident, anthrax is an intentional action, and the smallest action captures our attention in a way that the largest accident doesn't. If two airplanes had been hit by lightning and crashed into a New York skyscraper, few of us would be able to name the date on which it happened.

Global warming isn't trying to kill us, and that's a shame. If climate change had been visited on us by a brutal dictator or an evil empire, the war on warming would be this nation's top priority.

The second reason why global warming doesn't put our brains on orange alert is that it doesn't violate our moral sensibilities. It doesn't cause our blood to boil (at least not figuratively) because it doesn't force us to entertain thoughts that we find indecent, impious or repulsive. When people feel insulted or disgusted, they generally do something about it, such as whacking each other over the head, or voting. Moral emotions are the brain's call to action.......

Chimp_Logic wrote on Sep 23^rd, 2013 at 8:41pm:

Given the vastness of space and the improbability that ours is the only planet on which life has evolved, it seems unlikely that we're the only "intelligent" life in the universe. I've often wondered, therefore, why we're not overrun with interstellar tourists.

Perhaps we're seeing the answer now. They're not coming because they're all dead. That which we call "intelligence" is not survivable. 

There both a waste of tax payers money.....!!!

Only 2 to 3% of the population is gay, so gay rights are a minority group looking after their own needs.

And we all know the AGW is a scam to fleece nations of their wealth and dictate to them how they can use their own energy resources.

Chimp_Logic wrote on Sep 24^th, 2013 at 5:12pm:


The elite moguls that want to run the whole world under one umbrella are the very same people that are pushing for carbon pricing all over the world......!!!!!!!!!!!!!