[charlesdenault]

Incredible... the most eye-opening difference was the majority of Americans believe global warming will harm people in the US, but very few people believe it will harm them personally. And this isn't limited to west/northeast coasts-- it covers the entire country. What would cause people to think GW will harm others but not themselves?

[VLM]

To be extremely blunt, yet honest, poverty harms a lot of Americans but its not going to harm my socioeconomic group very much. Ditto heroin, meth... Its an admission of the death of class mobility. Most people will never be economically mobile enough to hang with me and it would be virtually impossible with my social support net to fall into extreme poverty. It could happen. Due to lack of social mobility its very unlikely however.

You can either model the effects of climate change as a parallel argument or merely a cloaked poverty argument. A parallel argument is Hurricane Katrina only hurt people on the south coast but the entire country saw Americans being hurt. The cloaked poverty argument is me and my descendants are in a socioeconomic group that was mildly inconvenienced by the hurricane whereas poor people, and we'll never be members of that group, literally died on TV. Either way Hurricane Katrina is a great example of people being harmed in the USA that could never in a geographic or socioeconomic sense hurt me and my family, or frankly anyone I work with or hang out with.

[eduren]

Unfortunate but true. There's a large amount of people (especially in this country), who feel that way. When they hear in policy discussions "X will harm people", they automatically translate to "X will harm people that can't afford to do Y". When a person's _entire_ social group can afford Y, then its really hard to make them see the need for that policy.

It's not a lack of compassion, it's a lack of visibility.

[rubyfan]

Optimism bias

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimism_bias

[mnw21cam]

Not even that. Say there is a random chance of 1 in 1,000,000 that any given person will be struck by a meteorite. In this case, I can quite happily say that the chance that I will be hit is very small, but the chance that someone will be hit is very high (because there are a lot more someones than just me).

If the probability of people being affected is random and independent, then the above explanation holds. If the probability of people being affected is correlated, then it holds less.

For example, say there is a random chance of 1 in 10 that the earth will be destroyed by a meteorite. Then, the chance that I will be destroyed is equal to the chance that someone will be destroyed.

I think for global warming, it will be somewhere in-between.

[golergka]

Future generations.

[bkkssnn]

So dark and so true.