Two stories today give us serious pause for thought. Both concern our old bête noire of climate change. It’s not the bad news per se: we’re kind of inured by now. It’s the way they open the door to thoughts with actual evolutionary consequences: but more of that later.
The first story, from Ajit Niranjam of the Guardian, is a grim reprise of current trends. [1] 2025 is the third hottest year on record. For us their killer fact is context: El Niño, which had boosted heating trends in 2023 and 2024, was waning by 2025, so even that fig leaf has been stripped away. And talking of stripping away, what about the forests, which might have soaked up a little more of all that lethal CO2 affording us a few more years of life? Well as this truly impressive piece of visual journalism by Ashley Kirk and Pablo Gutiérrez shows, they are being devasted by the very wildfires which global warming has brought about. This is what information theorists call a self re-inforcing feedback loop which would be intellectually interesting to study if anyone is left alive to do so.
And the evolutionary reason we are so worried? Our species carries ancient cognitive machinery that buckles under modern complexity. Human cognition defaults to fast, intuitive, pattern‑matching heuristics — brilliant for spotting predators in the savannah, disastrous for interpreting climate models This “cognitive autopilot” leaps to conclusions, prefers simple stories, and treats feelings as evidence. A species that cannot update beliefs in the face of overwhelming evidence, that treats data as optional, that cannot overcome its own cognitive biases is evolutionarily brittle. It will eventually be outcompeted by one that can. Can anyone think of a name for it?
[2] Mapped: how the world is losing its forests to wildfires | Wildfires | The Guardian
#climate change #global warming #evolution #atmosphere #weather #extinction
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