Optimism or Pessimism?

It's easy to be pessimistic about climate change, but there is a lot of optimism as well. In fact, optimism is psychologically critical.

As Paul Slovic states in the slide, he's not very focused on climate change. But the quote says a lot about climate change, which Paul characterizes as an "impossible problem from hell." As we think about tackling climate change it's not enough to focus on one technical solution or another, it's important to think about the nature of the problem.

The size of the challenge is what leads people who think about big problems to suggest that climate change may be more than we can get our heads around. Daniel Kahneman is a Nobel Economic Prize winner and the "father" of behavioral economics. He's an expert on how humans make decisions, and he's not optimistic about climate change.