Why do so many people ignore major threats like climate change?

Earlier last month, the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service announced that Earth’s average temperature in 2024 had been on average 1.5 degrees C above pre-industrial levels. This was the major threshold established in the 2015 Paris climate accord as a dangerous milestone for our species, in which temperatures are so hot, that collapse of major ocean and atmospheric systems and mass extinctions follow. Was this headline news? The biggest story of the year? The source of mass protests?

Quite to the contrary, it has already been swept under the rug in the public’s consciousness.

Yet the EU’s announcement did not occur in a vacuum: Scientists have warned of rising temperatures for decades, and 2024 alone saw climate change-fueled natural disasters from unprecedented heat waves in the Southwest to powerful hurricanes in the Southeast. Yet despite these calamities, millions of people voted for a president whose policies experts warn will worsen climate change. It raises a provocative question: Why do people find it so difficult to psychologically grasp the reality of human-caused climate change?

According to Dr. Debra J. Davidson, a professor of environmental sociology at the University of Alberta, it has to do with a feeling of psychological distance from the problem.

“For too long now, scientific and media communications have presented the subject of climate change in ways that have failed to trigger an adequate threat warning among readers and viewers, and have also failed to motivate a sense of personal responsibility to respond,” Davidson explained. Instead climate change is frequently depicted in the abstract, as an extremely complicated scientific process, and this causes many readers to feel remote from the consequences.

University of South Africa psychologist Dr. Monika dos Santos turns to evolutionary psychology for an explanation on humanity’s difficulty grasping the magnitude of the problem.

“Homo sapiens is a unique species in that our vastly superior intelligence does not seem, in the majority of individuals at least, to inhibit irrational destruction of its own species,” dos Santos told Salon. “In fact, the still largely untapped and evolving intelligence of our kind renders this destructiveness more and more horribly dangerous, not only to our own species, but to all other species, and to our entire environment and ability to survive in it.”

The rest of the planet is paying a steep price for humanity’s psychological myopia. Recent studies have shown that humans caused so many extinctions over the last 500 years that it would have taken 18,000 years for that same number of species to have naturally vanished had humans never existed. The average predicted extinction rate for freshwater animals and plants today is three orders of magnitude higher than it was during the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event 66 million years ago, when an asteroid likely killed the dinosaurs. Humans are ultimately on track to cause one million extinctions just through climate change.

Even if humans choose to be collectively indifferent to the suffering of other life forms, practically it is unwise for us to destroy our own ecosystem. We will not long survive as a civilization if that happens, which is not in our self-interest.

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“Evolution has been compared to a labyrinth of blind alleyways and there is nothing entirely peculiar or implausible in the assumption that the human innate equipment, though superior to that of any other living species, nonetheless contains some built-in error or deficiency that predisposes us toward self-destruction,” dos Santos argued.

Davidson also blamed humanity’s failure to grasp the problem on political tribalism. Because the fossil fuel industry has trillions of dollars and is ideologically aligned with both of America’s two major parties, though clearly more with Republicans, there is an ecosystem of falsehoods in the public sphere that distort general understanding of the issue.

“The ready availability of disinformation, and the tendency for people, facilitated by social media, to find themselves in echo chambers … offers many people a way out of contemplating the very serious existential threat that climate change poses,” Davidson said. “Who wouldn't prefer to believe everything is going to be fine? Furthermore, in our busy lives filled with multi-stressors, there are inevitably more pressing issues, whether it is the invasion of Palestine or paying the rent.”

More frustratingly for people who want to address the problem of climate change, scientific evidence shows that individuals who embrace denier myths develop an emotional, political attachment to those opinions. Because denying the science becomes a part of their identity, they develop a personal investment in disagreeing with the facts. This is a phenomenon known as “motivated reasoning” and means that, effectively, people who are motivated to dispute climate change are inclined to be stubborn for the same political reasons that inspired their initial anti-science attitude.

Further complicating matters for humanity, though, is the fact that even people who understand climate science often feel demoralized by a sense of powerlessness.

“Even for those who recognize the threat and are consequently highly concerned, many lack the sense of efficacy required to motivate engagement,” Davidson explained. That can mean either a lack of personal efficacy (i.e. my actions won't make a difference) or a collective efficacy or cynicism (i.e.other people, and our institutions just don't have what it takes to respond, therefore there’s no point in trying.

There are still ways individuals can make a difference — and when they do these things, it helps them feel better. A 2023 study in the journal PLOS Global Public Health of over 500 British young adults (between the ages of 16 and 24) found respondents who harbored negative thoughts about the future had better mental health when they also felt motivated to change the world.

"Our work suggests that emotions linked to climate change may inspire action-taking, which has implications for how we communicate about climate change," the authors write after pointing out that, despite the COVID-19 pandemic, respondents remained "distressed about climate change." They added, "Our findings also highlight the need for targeted, climate-aware psychosocial support to sustain young people's climate engagement and mental health simultaneously."

NASA climate scientist Dr. Peter Kalmus told Salon in January, emphasizing that he was only speaking for himself, advised concerned citizens to start at the local level, be willing to take risks and not "be afraid of your climate grief.”

He added, “It’s actually a powerful form of connection."

Dos Santos underscored that there is a path forward, that “the only viable solution for humankind is an ecological revolution, which requires a continuous process of switching from technology that contributes to pollution and climate change, to technology that is effective and clean. It comes after previous technical revolutions including the Industrial and Digital Revolutions.”