Blog 12: Disaster Information From Sandy

Through Hurricane Sandy, there have been huge rushes to teach about the danger of global warming and effects that nature has on our societies. We’ve been trying to teach everyone about human-driven climate change and being more involved with assessing ways to get a hold of the monstrous greenhouse emissions that are coming from us.

                This problem is said to affect us in extreme climate events that will increase not only in problem, but hopefully awareness and concern. Climate change awareness is “complex and strongly mediated by socially constructed attitudes” spoke George Marshall. HE believes that it is important to recongnize the social obsticales are removed by major impacts. He used an example of a fire in Texas because of an exteme drout in central Texas. He interviewed and noted that none of them mcould recall nay conversation about climate change and the fires. The people made no connetion or willingness to fix any of the problems because they didn’t notice any change in the weather and they weren’t interested in talking about it because of their pride, value of social relations, and resillence to overcome challenges. From these observations, he proved three things that happen to our societies because of disasters:

1.       Disasters can reinforce social networks and establish norms and worldviews:

·         He explained that in strong communities people tend to pull together and show inspiring collaboration and purpose, but that attitudes to climate change are related with political and ideological views, therefore making us anticipate that a stronger cultural problem can make it harder for ideas to be voiced or accepted. This created severe problems in climate changes within societies. Therefore creating a problem that will continue to grow larger and larger. Then, we could anticipate that extreme events might also reinforce concern to accept the climate changes. So, for example, Hurricane Sandy affects attitudes to climate change of both people and nature.

2.       Disasters can increase social confidence and certainty:

·         This acceptance of climate change requires a high leels of self-critisism and self doubt TI requires preparedness to accept personal responsibilities for the problems that we create in nature, and in doing this, we create debate and conflict beause we blame each other. Disasters provide proof of the worth of eisting social systems. Just like if your current economic model has served well, you’d feel like you don’t need to accept change. As Marshall explained, it’s just like the Germany and US War. When the US won, they inflated their global authority and it has stayed that way ever since. It’s just like the acceptance of climate change

3.       Disasters encourage powerful and compelling survival narratives that overwheale more complex ones:

·         People’s vview of the world is shaped through certain narratives, wrote Marshall. It was explained that social groups seek to negotiate naratives that are simple, easy, appealing, and share values. In doing this, they’ll reject competing narratives that’ll challenge the overall worldview. Then that narrative will have a hard time being accepted as a high social truth. Like in Texas the fires were caused by weather conditions that were caused by climate changed caused by the culture and behavior of it’s residents. Then, blame begins to rise after Disasters and we put our entire world in a pointing finger battle, when really we’re all to blame.

With all of these ideas, the range on Disasters has now expanded to be explained globally and socially because of the norms that we break and the disasters we cause because of our pride or our living conditions. We are the number one thing that causes disasters because of the way we live, but it’s up to us to fix it if we want to continue on and prosper globally, the question is how to begin. WE start with a step.