Courting procrastination

My poetic colleague over at WorldChanging, Chad Monfreda, gives us a profile of The Canary Project, a project aimed at providing the public with real-world visuals (not scientific graphs) of the effects of climate change. Chad motivates the project by highlighting the disconnect between the slow speed of climate change and fast-paced society:

"Humans are visual, short-term thinkers. We deal well with acute, visible threats but have trouble mustering the attention to address invisibly creeping, long-term ones. And global warming is the archetypical long-term villain. Concealed and slow, it courts procrastination."

Sensing slow changes from within a cacophony of fluctuations is not trivial. In fact, it is so non-trivial that it is used by climate change contrarians to exclaim that global warming ended in 1998! Andrew Dessler illustrates the fault in that approach. He concludes by saying:

"People who argue that global warming stopped in 1998 are 1) clever advocates who are willing to mislead to win the argument or 2) don't understand much about the climate system."

There's something else that courts procrastination. It's the internet.