What’s Being Ignored?

Mike Meyer
6 min readApr 3, 2024

Ignorance is bliss

Our summer 2024

Planetary climate disasters are like bankruptcy. Things go gradually and then suddenly.

We have had a hundred years of gradual changes, which were lost to the large number of variables in weather by area and season. For people living in many parts of the globe, the standard comment on the weather is, if you don’t like it, wait a little while, and it will change.

Our species are naturally short-term thinkers. For most of our existence, the most critical intervals were day and night and the seasons. Tracking seasons was a significant motivator of record creation and mathematics.

Marking the solstices and equinoxes defined the seasons and set the years that could be named, numbered, and grouped into eras and, ultimately, dynasties based on the lives of important people. All human groups do this.

People in regions that could support larger populations with more significant resources allowed more people to keep track of these things.

Most of our population has lost sensitivity to much beyond this. To these people, everything beneath the level of solar movements and seasons is noise with no meaning. Climate change is beyond their ken.

Human religions do not recognize change beyond seasons unless they have origin and final judgment stories…

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Mike Meyer

Writer, Educator, Campus CIO (retired) . Essays on our changing reality here, news and more at https://rlandok.substack.com/