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"Most people", meaning most articulate people with access to some form of public forum (since we don't know about the opinions of those not in that category), see the evidence of their own experience, such as typhoons and hurricanes of unusual savagery and destructiveness, alarmingly persistent droughts like the one drying Australia out, melting ice threatening the survival of polar bears, the dwindling and disappearance of many species at a rapid rate, rising sea levels along occupied coastlines, and on and on and on. Even if they don't read scientific studies or learn about them on the media, they know perfectly well that things are going bad, and that Global Warming seems to be the most rational explanation for what is happening around them.

Most people are smart enough to rely on their own senses and local wisdom even in the absence of scientists to quantify it all for them, confirm what is already observable, and integrate it into a larger world picture. So "most people" closely follow the development of the facts on Global Warming and the possibility of ameliorating its effects on their lives, and the lives of their kids and grandkids. Mystery solved.

The real question is, Why do some people still deny that Global Warming is happening, and with increasing speed taking us somewhere that no sane human being would ever want to go?

The answer is that propaganda works, particularly when it tells us what we want to hear - that everything's fine, that we haven't fouled our nest disastrously, and above all that we don't have to change anything. The power of human inertia is hard to overstate: we just want to go on being rich and comfortable (or anyway believing that any minute, when we win the lottery or inherit Aunt Sophie's money, we'll become rich and comfortable) and doing what we've always done. Stasis is effortless, change is hard. Learning new things takes energy we'd rather use drinking beer with our buddies, or watching movies about things blowing up, or shopping at the mall, or steering our careers higher up the business ladder.

But there's nothing like an emergency to snap us out of the haze of self-absorption, and that is finally happening. We've honed our technological skills on trivial gadgets for decades now; there is a sleeping giant of serious inventive genius in every industrialized nation that is beginning to wake. In more enlightened places than the current version of the United States, that genius is already on the move. Portugal is installing

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