In War and Peace Tolstoy wrote about the attitude of the people in Moscow as Napoleon’s army advanced towards the city:
At the approach of danger there are always two voices that speak with equal power in the human soul: one very reasonably tells a man to consider the nature of the danger and the means of escaping it; the other, still more reasonably, says that it is too depressing and painful to think of the danger, since it is not in man’s power to foresee everything and avert the general course of events, and it is therefore better to disregard what is painful till it comes, and to think about what is pleasant. In solitude a man generally listens to the first voice, but in society to the second....
Tolstoy obviously didn’t know about global warming, but he certainly knew about the tendency to disregard what is painful.
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