[FooHentai]

We're wired for short-term thinking and this is a good example of it. When someone hears '4 degrees of warming' they think of what 4 degrees change feels like to them in the context of a day. Which is to say, not much. Sounds kinda nice. Same thing with sea level rises. We think of a shoreline we are familiar with, and consider a future for that place where the water level is a few feet higher. Chances are what's being pictured looks like no big deal.

A person would have to make the choice to actively investigate further the marginal effects of such a change, the impact from the rate of change, and points that are less obvious such as global temperature averages incorporating the 70%-of-the-surface heatsink that is the world's oceans. That kind of prompting for further thinking is for sure already happening in classrooms worldwide, and is one of the reasons there's such a stark difference in opinions on the issue as you look across the age brackets.

One way to tackle this might be better messaging, but looking back over the attempts to pivot on that front (global warming -> Climate change) and how much of an easy target that became for criticism, I'm not hopeful.

I wonder if there would be a greater impact on the way people think about climate change if the messaging was more specific to the places in which the audience lived? For sure a big challenge here will be accuracy, even if it's possible to bring the conversation down to that level.