When I see the ashen debris of yet another forest fire gone unchecked, I instantly think back to a time, merely a few years ago, when would we look at the same sky and worry about another microscopic particle floating in the air, COVID-19. I reminiscence how we processed COVID-19 as it was happening. And I cannot help but see similarities in how we think about the health effects of climate change.
The cognitive errors that appeared during the pandemic are the same core misunderstandings we see regarding climate change.
Early in the pandemic, we were paralyzed by fears that grew into an existential concern of the unknown. We worried about our families, whether the fabric of society would hold, and whether this virus would forever confine us to our homes. However, just as quickly as the fear arose, it dissipated. The paroxysmal fear that gripped our lives quickly melted into indifference.
It happened in two phases. The first came out of the deluge of information. Some called it a biological weapon of war orchestrated by foreign actors. Others said we were being misled by a centralized government bent on controlling our health. The second phase emerged when the overabundance of information overwhelmed our senses to the point of inactivity. Once we were unable to comprehend what was going on, we became numb to the theories trying to explain it all.
This isn’t unique to pandemics. We’re wired this way. We fail to see how broader trends around us, subtle as they might initially appear, can transform into pervasive influences that directly affect our lives. There’s nothing or nobody to blame for this. It’s inherent to how we think. It’s a logical fallacy.
We’re great at thinking big. And we’re great at following daily habits – thinking small, so to speak, for everyday things. But we’re shockingly bad at applying big picture thinking into our lives.
But this isn’t just a matter of awareness. Logical fallacies are a curious thing. We know they exist. But we nevertheless fall for them, even when we know they adversely affect the way we think. We saw it during the pandemic. And we continue to see it for climate change. We’re flooded with information. We don’t know what to do with it all. So once we’re overwhelmed, we just shut down and grow indifferent – perhaps even comfortably numb.
I see it as a combination of two well-known fallacies interacting with one another: ecological fallacy and flatland fallacy.
Ecological fallacy is an error in the interpretation of statistical data that occurs when inferences about individuals are deduced from inferences about the group to which those individuals belong. Simply put, we struggle to apply broad interpretations to individuals and vice versa.
Flatland fallacy is an error that stems from our inability to reason in more than a few dimensions, particularly in contexts that require integrating multiple sources of information together.
The two fallacies, when combined, produce an effect similar to what we see when we combine two objects oscillating in harmonic motion: chaos. Individually, things might appear sensible enough to where we can see through the cognitive errors. But when it’s all put together, we create a plethora of logical errors until it breaks down into chaos. I’d call it a defect, but it’s clearly baked into our cognition. So maybe calling it an error is an error itself.
When we see clinical studies that correlate indoor air quality with student test scores, we simply shrug at the plausibility of it, but fail to truly act in a meaningful way because we don’t believe it enough to find it compelling. It seems sensible enough to be true. But do we sufficiently understand it to actually believe it? There are too many factors involved. It’s just too hard to make sense of it all broadly or individually. And it’s just easier to think in more simple terms. So we remain indifferent and move on.
It’s dangerously convenient to default to this mode of thinking. But it’s why we’re incapable of enacting basic policy decisions like upgrading gas stoves. Found in nearly half of all U.S. households, gas stoves emit nitrogen dioxide and other air pollutants and heat-trapping methane gas that can harm respiratory health and contribute to climate change. People with lung diseases, like asthma, are especially vulnerable to these emissions.
It’s not hard for us to grasp this at a simple level. But action requires deep conviction, which only comes when there’s a fundamental understanding of the issues at hand. It’s not that we can’t understand it. It’s that we default to not wanting to understand it.
Consequently, we languish in half-hearted acknowledgements. Climate change, and its affects on our health, is too complex for us to understand, with too many considerations to juggle. We find the simplest solution to justify caring about it somewhat, but not caring enough to do something about it. We default to indifference. And we do it without even noticing that we’re doing it, even when we know we have a tendency to do so.
The thing is: the health effects of climate change aren’t beyond our comprehension. We just think they are. We feel like the issues are too complicated with too many moving pieces that we cannot organize at a systemic or individual level. We conveniently simplify it until we justify ignoring it and moving on.
Until we recognize our tendencies to succumb to these logical fallacies, we’ll continue to fall for them even when we know they’re affecting the way we think. If we’re serious about tackling the healthcare effects of climate change, we should start with the basics. We should challenge the way we think, right down to our baseline cognitive tendencies.
It might not sound as glamorous as some of the more grandiose proposals we see from politicians, but it’s far more effective. Indeed, often the most perplexing problems can be solved by simply adjusting the way we think.
Raising awareness of the health consequences of climate change just might be that simple – or just that complex. I suppose it depends on how you want to think about it.
