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We tend to judge the likelihood and significance of things based on how easily they come to mind. The more “available” a piece of information is to us, the more important it seems. The result is that we give greater weight to information we learned recently because a news article you read last night comes to mind easier than a science class you took years ago. It’s too much work to try to comb through every piece of information that might be in our heads.
This recognition should cause us to rethink what ‘nature’ and ‘wilderness’ really are. If by ‘nature’ we mean something divorced from or untouched by humans, there’s almost nowhere on Earth where such conditions exist, or have existed for thousands of years. The same can be said of Earth’s climate. If early agricultural land use began warming our climate thousands of years ago, as the early anthropogenic hypothesis suggests, it implies that no ‘natural’ climate has existed for millennia.
Tania Lombrozo looks at research published Monday showing people's factual judgment of how much danger a child is in while a parent is away varies according to the extent of their moral outrage.
Daniel Sarewitz on why scientists must come out of the lab and into the real world