Welcome to the new abnormal, East Coast, writes John Valliant
; it gets in your eyes and nose, but what is most damaging is what it does to your head: your home, the world you thought you knew, is no longer quite the same. You feel a new precarity, and a creeping fear: what if it doesn’t go away?
There is actually a name for this phenomenon: the Lucretius Problem. Lucretius was a Roman poet and philosopher who identified this cognitive disconnect more than 2000 years ago. Nassim Taleb, author of, paraphrases Lucretius this way: “The fool believes the tallest mountain in the world will be equal to the tallest he has observed.” In essence, the Lucretius Problem is rooted in the difficulty humans have imagining and assimilating things outside their own personal experience.
Six hundred miles from the Arctic Circle, Fort McMurray may seem remote, but nearly half of all American petroleum imports—around four million barrels per day—originate there. Rendering bitumen into a useable petroleum requires astonishing quantities of natural gas, and it’s why Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise while those of other G-7 nations have been dropping for a decade or more.
Baffling to those trying to communicate the hazards of 21st century weather is the way in which responsible authorities continually underestimate accurate predictions, despite persistent warnings , that we must expect lethal and unfamiliar extremes from every kind of weather. Most dismaying to climate scientists and weather analysts is how each of these failures mirrors, in microcosm, our collective failure to prepare for the larger, systemic threats posed by global climate disruption.
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