"Swine Flu" vs. Global Warming

Just a little workout for your brain tonight. Imagine if all the media headlines about the outbreak of swine flu in Mexico (the US and a few other countries, including NZ) replaced the words "swine flu" with "global warming". Would the world react similarly?

Of course not. But why?

Even though it seems likely at this stage that swine flu may have been especially virulent in a few Mexican cases, the majority of "confirmed" cases seem to have been diagnosed after the patient has already fully recovered. Swine flu, in its human form, appears to be nothing much different from existing human influenza. The students infected in New Zealand thought they had just been suffering the effects of Montezuma's Revenge - not the latest global health scare.

Surely global warming must be slightly more alarming, given years of research findings released two years ago by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change?

The main point is that this is a good example of one type of systematic irrationality that is preventing coordinated action against threats that are not immediate. Namely, most of us can identify with a killer disease, as it would affect us direclty (rather fast). Global warming, however, requires second-order thinking, namely because it does not affect us immediately like a killer disease would. Instead, one would have to imagine the personal impact of, for example, sea levels in Bangladesh rising, which means millions of refugees, who then may flood into your country. Or the disruption of agriculture, which would mean higher food prices.

So even though a swine flu-type response would do a lot to mitigate global warming (or focus on appropriate adaptation measures), don't expect to see this type of coordinated action until those Bangladeshi refugees show up at the border.