It seems pretty obvious to me why the right wing people fail to understand the issues at hand. They have been told for years by the media they choose to watch and by their peers that there is no such thing as man made climate change. These people will never understand the issues simply because they don't understand the concept of time.
Take for example the bark beetle infestation of the nation's forests. There has been forests in America for millions of years, in fact most of the continent was forested for millions of years. There have been bark beetles for millions of years. They are probably as old as conifers. After the last ice age which was the result of the a natural cyclic phenomenon associated with Milankovich cycles (precession, axial tilt and eccentricity) the forests regenerated over a period of about 10,000 years. Bark beetles evolved along with them. They moved from lower elevations to higher elevations with the rise in temperature. Freezing kills their eggs and larva so altitude kept them in check for the past 8 thousand years or more (a period of relatively stable temperatures). Now, in less then a generation of mankind (just a few decades) they have doubled their range.
www.sciencedaily.com
Anyone can take a drive to their nearest mountain range and see the devastation these insects have caused, but they don't see how fast this forest plague has developed into a full blown epidemic so they don't understand the concepts of cause and effect.
You can't blame the non scientists. It's our nature as human animals to only see what is around us today, not 200 or 2 thousand or even 2 million years ago. That is where the scientific process of research and discovery makes us different from the rest of the animals. We have the ability to observe and reason and also record events which become historical records. We can if we choose explain things in a concept of time. The problem with time is that it is a fourth dimension that is nearly infinite and therefore somewhat elusive.
The whole argument against AWG as proposed by the right is based on past cycles. They just don't understand the scale they are discussing. Either you get it or you don't.
I think liberal thinking and conservative thinking is a natural reaction to our concept of how we view time. Conservatives discovered what works for them based on what happened in the near past. They, in effect, are caught in a dilemma that is predictable only if things don't change too fast. A future that changes too fast scares the hell out of them.
When Aldous Huxley Wrote 'Brave New World' he was scoffed at by the right, yet look how many of his predictions became reality. He understood the concept that the the world is ever changing or dynamic, not static as the right needs to believe in order to make business and personal decisions. Liberals, in contrast, expect change and flow with it. They don't fear change as much when they accept that it is inevitable. They tend to react by trying new ideas and methods of coping with change. Conservatives insist oil is the best form of energy production because it works and they don't see the need to invest in other resources. They view it as an infinite resource (some even suggest it comes from lava), where as liberals understand the concept of non-renewable resources and plan ahead knowing that the future will be different as the population goes up.
We can't blame the right, they will always be close minded and unaware of the factor of time. It's like yin and yang. We must learn to co-exist. The world needs the worker bees on the right and the creative thinkers on the left. It's best to just not worry about what the right thinks and get on with the business of creating alternatives to the pending ecological crisis. The right will get around to realizing the need for innovation soon enough.
