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Why Record Droughts Still Haven't Converted Climate Change Deniers

The 2011 drought in Texas was the costliest in state history, racking up "almost $8 billion":http://www.usatoday.com/weather/drought/story/2012-03-22/texas-drought-losses/53703926/1 in agriculture losses alone. Meanwhile, a long-term drought in Mexico...

The 2011 drought in Texas was the costliest in state history, racking up almost $8 billion in agriculture losses alone. Meanwhile, a long-term drought in Mexico has cost farmers more than a billion dollars. And over in Europe, farmers have been hit by the double whammy of a freezing winter and a coming dry spell. All around the world, water is proving hard to find.

It’s a preview of what’s to come as the world’s weather increases in volatility due to climate change. Yet climate change denialism still runs as strong as ever in some parts. Now, I wouldn’t advocate anyone going all Chicken Little about anything, especially not something as globally important as climate science. But I have to ask (and policy makers should too): At what point do things get so bad that deniers change their tune? Are some of us biologically predisposed to sticking their heads into the drought-scorched sand?

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When you compare pre-modern humans (when we did the bulk of our evolving) to our current selves, two giant things have changed. First, the world’s population has become too large to subsist on the most natural modes of resource gathering – and I mean natural, as in pulling water from a stream, foraging berries from a bush, and killing a deer or squirrel that walks by.

Here’s the Telegraph, a respected news organization, reporting on the UN, another respected organization, finding climate change is responsible for drought in Ethiopia. The YouTube commenters aren’t convinced.

Of course, that population growth was only possible precisely because we’ve moved away from hunter-gathering towards ever-more efficient techniques of resource production – herding, agriculture, irrigation, industrialized farming, and so on. That means that now we’re producing more food (really, more stuff overall) than we ever have in our history.

What’s that mean? At the same time that we’re using more resources than we ever have – thanks to our efficiency – we’re also farther removed from gathering those resources. So as you turn on your shower while opening a vacuum-sealed package of chicken breasts (I hope no one actually does that), it’s easy to forget both where that water and flesh came from, and that millions of people worldwide are doing the same thing at the same time.

Now, I’m not some rabid paleodiet guy who only eats sprouts he grows in his window garden and runs barefoot marathons in Pandora face paint. (It has been long discussed, however, that city life is wrecking humans.) I find beauty in efficiency, and I love that I get to subsist by writing and being a person on the Internet, rather than growing meager millet crops. But there’s one key point: Even as we’re using more and more resources – a lot more, as we’re using more per capita and have a larger population – we’re farther removed from actually acquiring them.

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So it’s pretty hard to tell if the aquifer is begin to run dry, or if poor weather is making crops scarce, or if ocean acidification is wrecking the tuna sandwich supply.

Designing our cities around natural processes will help us fit 7 billion people on the planet, says thinktank Terreform ONE in our Upgrade series.

In prehistoric times, we had to worry about gathering food and water – it may have been easier than we think – but overall, there was enough to go around. (If there hadn’t been, we would not be here right now.) So while we’ve evolved a concern about resources in the short term, we’ve never really been forced to focus on the long term.

In the developed world, we’ve become accustomed to having what we need available all the time. We may complain that an out of season banana flown in from Costa Rica is more expensive than usual, but it’s still there. Even it your grocer didn’t have something, you can special order it from FreshDirect or Amazon or Craigslist. But how do you special order a city’s worth of water? And from where?

In the past, when faced with famine and drought, humans survived by moving to where conditions are better. But what happens when Florida’s under water and the Southwest runs dry? It’s an unprecedented scenario, which is likely why so many people aren’t too concerned with unpredictable weather that comes with climate change. There’s never been pressure to worry about it in the past, which means we might not have any evolved instinct to worry about it now. That begs one question: As the physical effects of climate change keep building, who’s going to be the last person with their head in the sand? From a biological standpoint, there won’t be one last person. There’s likely to be a lot.

Evolution Explains is a periodical investigation into the human-animal (humanimal?) condition through the powerful scientific lenses of ecology and evolution. Previously on Evolution Explains: Why People Quit Via Op-Ed.

Follow Derek Mead on Twitter. Have a question? Write Derek at derek(at)motherboard.tv.