An article, Australian Researcher warns about Mass Human Extinction from Global Environmental Collapse by John Berbatis made me think, "Gee. Maybe things are worse than even I thought."

He writes: "Judging by the current extremes of global weather conditions and the recent increase in worldwide seismic activity, I believe humanity will face extinction before the end of 2008."

2008 !!! Holy Cow. And here I've been worried about the coming economic collapse at about that time.

Alarmist? Maybe. Maybe not. That's next year. Maybe he's wrong and it's at least 10 or 20 years away. Whew! That would be a relief.

But really. Exponential increases do quickly get out of hand and humans are really, really terrible at recognizing how quickly. How terrible? This graph shows how bad we are at it based on experiments with real human beings.

Estimating Exponential Growth. From The Logic of Failure, Recognizing and Avoiding Error in Complex Situations by Dietrich Dorner, 1996, that I used in my Systems Thinking and Problem Solving class at Colorado Tech (in the slides for the second class).

Link to Systems Thinking and Problem Solving class.

Beyond this, we're terrible at understanding the dynamics of stocks and flows as described at Global Warming: An Inconvenient-to-Understand Truth and Sterman's paper to which there is a link, also based on experiments with human beings, students from MIT and Harvard.

So that's two reasons why the seriousness of climate change is so easy to obfuscate, which I view as a crime of planetary proportions considering the number of people who will die unless the human race takes immediate action.