“What is this global warming bull shit! It’s cold out here!”

So I harassed my fellow climate activists as they arrived at our recent meeting of the Cleveland Climate Watch, and the Coal Committee of the Northeast Ohio Sierra Club. With a foot of snow on the ground and temps in the teens and twenties, I borrowed denier lingo for a little self-inflicted humor.

Humor aside, climate activists hear this all the time. From meteorologists. From deniers. From neighbors. From friends and family. With a great portion of the Northern Hemisphere under the coldest weather we have seen in some time, deniers are delighting in saying, “What global warming?”

This response is actually a teachable moment on why our society is having such a hard time grasping, much less taking action on, what most environmentalists consider the issue of the century. Houston, we have a problem. In fact we have a bunch of problems, many of which have little to nothing to do with the issue of global warming and climate change. These problems include:

• Time and history and the American mind. “History is bunk,” said Henry Ford. Americans are a people who came to America to escape history. We are a people who live in the now, with the past to be forgotten and the future to take care of itself. Consumer society, armed with instant communications, has rewired the American brain to operate like a flat screen TV where the viewer is holding down the button on the remote as the channels flip by. Readers can no longer get through the books of past times because they demand a longer attention span than contemporaries can manage. No more War and Peace, now we have flash fiction. This cuts the knees out from under an ability to appreciate climate, which requires a long historical view to appreciate, and is a challenge to our ADD-addled society.

• The weather/climate mix-up. Most Americans think that climate is what their chirpy weather people report on obsessively. We are in a situation where the ignorant are instructing the uninformed about a subject neither of them know much about. Meteorologists, by and large, do not study climate science. Many of them are in the denier camp. They have seen their share of weather forecasts go wrong, so climate forecasts are to be dismissed and distrusted even more. The problem is that equating weather with climate is like writing a book review based on the first sentence of the first paragraph of a very long book. Weather is about having to dust the snow off the car in the morning. Climate is about glaciers. Weather is  about if you are going to be able to mow the lawn today. Climate is about whether that lawn is even possible without irrigation. Most people will go through their entire lives without ever meeting, or even hearing a talk by, a climatologist. But 24/7 you have the Weather Channel informing and misinforming you. Guess which one defines your world?

• The Great Disconnect. Most of us in America live our lives in a state of total obliviousness about how the environment affects our lives. We could not be more disconnected from the planet we live on if we were in an outpost on Mars – because in a way we are. We live in houses that are climate controlled. We live in cars that are climate controlled. Climate is not that great narrative of ice ages, the waxing and waning of tropics, savannas, and temperate periods. It is whether or not you set the furnace or boiler on 65 or 70. Most of our ancestors were in tune with the changes in the seasons. Climate determined where they lived, the trades they followed and whether or not their families survived or starved. It still does in many parts of the world, but those are lands most of us will never visit, and people we will never know. We ignore climate and the world around us because we think we can. How long that happy, delusional state of affairs will remain valid is one of the great questions that will define our still-new century.

There is a temptation to want to sell the solutions to climate change as actions that will require very little change in the rest of our lives. It is called win/win. We are fooling ourselves when we think that. Climate change and global warming are not that neat. They do not fit snugly in a box we can store in the garage. We cannot confront these issues without confronting ourselves. They are about much, much more than where you set your thermostat, or whether or not you have to shovel your driveway. That is why denial makes so much sense. It is easy. Facing up to the issue of climate change is hard. You really can’t blame people for wanting the easy way out. The only question is where does the easy way out lead you?