WHEN EXTRAORDINARY BECAME TUESDAY

Why we stopped being surprised by climate change.

Thirty years ago, climate change felt comfortably distant. It belonged to scientists with complicated graphs, politicians arguing over those graphs, and the occasional lonely polar bear balancing on a shrinking piece of ice. It was tomorrow’s problem, and tomorrow always seemed to have somewhere else to be. George Carlin once remarked that, “The planet is fine. The people are screwed.”¹ At the time, it landed as dark comedy. Today it feels uncomfortably close to a diagnosis.

Then tomorrow quietly arrived.

Not with a single unforgettable catastrophe, but with thousands of smaller ones. One unusually hot summer became several. One “historic” wildfire season became the new normal. Hurricanes kept breaking records until meteorologists seemed to run out of adjectives, while “once-in-a-century” floods began appearing every few years, as though the calendar itself had become confused. Communities that once discussed the weather as harmless small talk now watched forecasts with the same anxious anticipation people reserve for biopsy results.

Yet the remarkable story isn’t that these things happened. It’s that they stopped feeling remarkable.

If someone had handed us today’s headlines in 1995, we would have assumed civilization was in the middle of a planetary emergency. Vast stretches of North America disappearing beneath smoke from Canadian wildfires. Rivers across Europe shrinking to levels unseen in generations. Temperatures in parts of the Middle East and the American Southwest reaching ranges once thought incompatible with normal outdoor life. Insurance companies abandoning entire neighborhoods because the financial risk had become impossible to calculate.² Each event would have dominated the news for weeks.

Now they’re Tuesday.

That, more than climate change itself, is what fascinates me. I’m less interested in debating whether the climate is changing than in asking why we’ve stopped reacting as though it is. As a psychiatrist, I spend much of my career thinking about adaptation. The first night you sleep near railroad tracks, every passing train jolts you awake. Six months later, your brain has quietly erased the noise. The refrigerator stops humming. Your new glasses stop feeling strange. The smell from the paper mill vanishes. Our brains are constantly editing out what has become familiar so we can notice whatever is new.

Most of the time, that’s a remarkable gift. Without it, we’d be overwhelmed by every sensation, every minute of every day. But evolution never promised we’d adapt only to good things. We adapt to chronic pain, to political dysfunction, to homelessness on street corners, to school shootings, and it turns out, to living through the largest environmental transformation in the history of human civilization. The very ability that allows us to survive difficult circumstances may also prevent us from recognizing just how extraordinary those circumstances have become.

• Increase in global average temperature since the late 19th century: approximately 1.3–1.5°C.³
• Number of the ten warmest years on record that have occurred since 2014: 10.⁴
• Number of U.S. billion-dollar weather and climate disasters in 1980: 3. In recent years: often more than 25 annually.⁵

Our Brains Weren’t Built for Slow Disasters

Imagine you step outside and see a lion walking across your front lawn. Your heart rate spikes, stress hormones flood your bloodstream, and every ounce of your attention locks onto one question: How do I not become lunch? Evolution rewarded brains that reacted instantly to immediate danger because those were the brains that survived long enough to have children. The people who paused to debate whether the lion represented a genuine threat rarely contributed much to the gene pool.

Climate change doesn’t work that way.

It behaves less like a lion and more like hypertension. Or high cholesterol. Or lead slowly accumulating in a child’s bloodstream. Or cigarettes. The danger isn’t found in any single day but in the accumulation of thousands of days that seem almost identical. One hot summer doesn’t transform a planet. Neither do two. But year after year, almost imperceptibly, the baseline shifts until what once seemed extraordinary begins to feel routine.

This isn’t a flaw in human intelligence; it’s simply how our brains evolved. Psychologists call it hedonic adaptation or habituation, the remarkable ability to stop noticing what has become familiar. Neuroscientists describe something similar through predictive coding, in which the brain gradually ignores expected information so it can devote its limited attention to whatever is novel.⁶ The system works brilliantly most of the time. If we consciously noticed every sound, smell, or sensation every waking moment, we’d never get anything done.

Unfortunately, the same machinery that allows us to ignore the hum of the refrigerator also allows us to ignore slow-moving catastrophes.

As physicians, we encounter this every day. High blood pressure is called the “silent killer” because people usually don’t feel it. Type 2 diabetes often develops over years before anyone realizes something is wrong. Smoking rarely causes lung cancer after the first cigarette, and obesity develops one meal at a time rather than overnight. Much of medicine consists of convincing patients to take seriously conditions that don’t yet feel serious.

Public health has always shared that challenge. Its greatest victories are often invisible because they prevent disasters before anyone notices them. Vaccination programs, clean drinking water, sewage treatment, lead removal from gasoline, food safety regulations, seat belts, tobacco control, and fluoridated water all asked people to care about threats that weren’t immediately obvious.⁷ Climate change belongs squarely in that tradition. It isn’t simply an environmental problem waiting for ecologists to solve. It’s another slow-moving public-health emergency that asks us to care about tomorrow before tomorrow arrives.

• Average time it takes many smokers to develop smoking-related lung cancer: often decades.⁸
• Percentage of U.S. adults with hypertension who have no symptoms attributable to their elevated blood pressure: the vast majority.⁹
• Number of years between recognition of the dangers of lead exposure and the removal of lead from gasoline in the United States: roughly 50.¹⁰

Perhaps that’s why climate change feels so psychologically elusive. It doesn’t demand our attention the way an earthquake or a terrorist attack does. Instead, it quietly rearranges the background of everyday life until yesterday’s record becomes today’s expectation and today’s expectation becomes tomorrow’s normal.

By the time we notice how much the world has changed, we’ve often forgotten what it used to feel like.

When Everything Is Breaking News, Nothing Is

My father subscribed to the morning newspaper and the evening newspaper. Walter Cronkite came on once each night, calmly informed America what had happened, and then politely got out of the way so everyone could watch MASH. There was enough time between crises to actually think about them.

Today we consume more information before breakfast than previous generations encountered in weeks. Our phones vibrate with breaking news before the previous breaking news has finished breaking. Somewhere a celebrity is getting divorced, a politician is outraged, a billionaire is tweeting, a market is crashing, and someone on social media has discovered a new reason civilization is ending by Thursday.

Attention has become one of the world’s most valuable commodities.

Climate change never stopped happening. It simply had to compete.

Every wildfire now arrives just as the next political scandal erupts. Every hurricane is followed by another Supreme Court decision, another war, another economic report, another viral video of someone attempting to microwave aluminum foil. The climate didn’t become less important. It became one more contestant in an endless competition for our limited attention.

Psychologists have long understood that repeated exposure gradually dulls emotional responses.¹¹ News organizations know this too, although they have little choice but to keep feeding the machine. Every headline must be louder than yesterday’s because yesterday’s headline has already disappeared beneath a thousand newer ones. Ironically, the harder everyone works to capture our attention, the less attention any one story receives.

The result is a strange kind of emotional inflation. Record-breaking temperatures no longer feel record-breaking because there was another record last month. A “historic” wildfire barely has time to become history before another one begins. The language itself loses its meaning. If every disaster is unprecedented, eventually unprecedented starts sounding routine.

Bill Hicks joked that, “Watching television is like taking black spray paint to your third eye.”¹² It was a comedian’s exaggeration, but like many good jokes it contained an uncomfortable truth. Constant stimulation doesn’t necessarily make us more informed. Sometimes it simply makes us numb.

This isn’t unique to climate change. We see the same phenomenon after mass shootings. The first dominates the national conversation for weeks. The tenth receives a day. By the hundredth, many Americans struggle to remember where it happened. The events haven’t become less tragic. We’ve simply exhausted our capacity for surprise.

Climate change suffers from the same psychological trap. The emergency continues, but our emotional response gradually fades. Not because the evidence became weaker, but because familiarity quietly replaced astonishment.

• Average American media consumption: well over 10 hours of media exposure per day across platforms.¹³
• Number of weather and climate disasters causing more than $1 billion in damage in the U.S. has increased dramatically over the past four decades.¹⁴
• Human attention span has not increased despite the explosion in available information: still about the same brain, facing exponentially more input.¹⁵

Perhaps the greatest irony is that information has never been more abundant, yet sustained attention has rarely been more scarce. We aren’t ignoring climate change because we know too little. We’re ignoring it because we’re being asked to notice everything else at the same time.

When Facts Become Team Sports

One of the stranger developments of the past few decades is that we’ve managed to turn the weather into a political opinion.

That shouldn’t even make sense. Hurricanes don’t register to vote. Mosquitoes don’t watch cable news. Carbon dioxide has never asked whether you prefer Republicans, Democrats, libertarians, or the Green Party. Nature has always displayed a stubborn indifference to our political identities. Yet somewhere along the way, a scientific question slowly transformed into a cultural one, and once that happened, changing your mind became far more difficult.

Psychologists have known for decades that people rarely form beliefs by carefully weighing evidence and then reaching an objective conclusion. More often, we reach a conclusion first and then spend the next several years hiring our intelligence to defend it.¹⁶ The smarter we are, the better we become at constructing arguments for positions we’ve already adopted. Intelligence, unfortunately, is no vaccine against motivated reasoning. Sometimes it’s simply a more sophisticated lawyer.

I’ve written before that certainty is one of the most intoxicating feelings human beings experience. It feels safe. It feels comforting. Most importantly, it feels like knowledge. But certainty often has very little to do with how much we actually know. Once an issue becomes woven into our identity, evidence is forced to compete with something much stronger: the fear of belonging to the wrong tribe.

Climate change wandered directly into that trap.

Instead of asking, What does the evidence show? we increasingly asked, Who’s saying it? If “our side” believed something, we leaned toward believing it too. If the other side embraced it, skepticism suddenly felt like loyalty. The scientific method quietly gave way to the social method.

Physicians see versions of this every day. Patients arrive convinced that vaccines are dangerous, antidepressants are addictive, gluten is poisoning them, or supplements sold on the Internet can cure diseases that have resisted decades of scientific research. Presenting more evidence often changes surprisingly few minds because facts aren’t really competing against ignorance. They’re competing against identity, community, and the comfort of certainty.¹⁷

Climate change followed the same path. What began as a discussion about atmospheric chemistry gradually became a test of political belonging. Once that happened, each new study, each new hurricane, each new wildfire, and each new temperature record was filtered through a question that had nothing to do with science: Which side benefits if I believe this?

That’s an extraordinarily difficult obstacle to overcome because our brains are social before they’re rational. For most of human history, being expelled from your tribe could be fatal. Evolution cared far more about whether you stayed with your group than whether you happened to be correct about the weather.

The tragedy is that physics doesn’t negotiate. The atmosphere doesn’t compromise. Greenhouse gases don’t care how we voted. Reality has never been particularly interested in our opinions.

• Percentage of Americans who say climate change is happening varies substantially by political affiliation.¹⁸
• People with greater scientific literacy are not necessarily less susceptible to motivated reasoning when issues become politically polarized.¹⁹
• Strong group identity often predicts beliefs more accurately than exposure to factual information alone.²⁰

Perhaps the most effective strategy for delaying action on climate change was never convincing people that it wasn’t real. It was convincing them that accepting the evidence meant joining the other team. Once facts become jerseys, everyone forgets they’re still playing on the same field.

The Patient Is the Environment

When most people hear the phrase climate change, they picture melting glaciers, disappearing forests, rising oceans, or perhaps a lonely polar bear searching for solid ice. They think of it as an environmental issue, something to be debated by climatologists, environmentalists, and politicians.

I don’t.

I see patients.

One of the advantages of practicing medicine is that ideology eventually gives way to physiology. Nobody argues with dehydration. Heat stroke doesn’t care about your voting record. Asthma doesn’t ask whether wildfire smoke came from a red state or a blue state. Every day in medicine reminds us that nature has never been particularly interested in our opinions.

A child comes into the office wheezing because weeks of wildfire smoke have pushed her asthma beyond what an inhaler can control. An older man collapses during a heat wave because medications that normally protect his heart also make it harder for his body to regulate temperature. Someone with chronic kidney disease arrives dehydrated after several days of extreme heat. A family loses its home to flooding, and months later they’re sitting in a psychiatrist’s office wondering why they can’t sleep, why every heavy rain makes their heart pound, and why they suddenly feel unsafe in a place that used to feel like home.

None of them scheduled an appointment because of climate change. They came because climate change had quietly arrived before they did.

That’s the way public health usually works. Physicians spend surprisingly little time treating root causes. We treat their consequences. Cholera isn’t really about diarrhea; it’s about contaminated water. Lung cancer isn’t really about tumors; it’s about tobacco. Lead poisoning isn’t fundamentally about damaged brains; it’s about the environments children inhabit. Long before patients appear in our offices, public health has been asking a different question: What happened upstream?

Climate change belongs squarely in that tradition.

Longer and more intense heat waves increase dehydration, kidney injury, heat stroke, and cardiovascular disease, particularly among older adults, young children, outdoor workers, and people taking medications that interfere with temperature regulation.²¹ Warmer temperatures lengthen pollen seasons, making asthma and allergies more severe, while expanding the habitat of ticks and mosquitoes allows diseases to appear in places where physicians rarely worried about them before.²² Crop failures, drought, flooding, and extreme weather disrupt food supplies, displace families, and create ripple effects that spread far beyond agriculture.

The psychiatric consequences are no less striking. Following hurricanes, floods, wildfires, and prolonged droughts, rates of depression, anxiety, substance use disorders, and post-traumatic stress disorder consistently rise.²³ Even without dramatic disasters, prolonged heat has been associated with greater irritability, aggression, emergency psychiatric visits, and an increased risk of suicide.²⁴ We sometimes joke that people “lose their minds” when it’s hot outside, but the brain is an organ like any other. It requires oxygen, blood flow, sleep, and a relatively stable environment to function well. When the environment changes, so does the brain.

• Heat is the leading weather-related cause of death in the United States.²⁵
• Allergy seasons across much of North America are now weeks longer than they were several decades ago.²⁶
• Climate-related disasters displace millions of people every year, increasing the risk of both physical illness and mental health disorders.²⁷

This is why I’ve become increasingly uncomfortable calling climate change an environmental issue. Of course it is. But it’s also a medical issue, an agricultural issue, an economic issue, a military issue, a national security issue, and certainly a psychiatry issue. Fundamentally, though, it’s a public-health issue because public health has never been about treating disease one patient at a time. It’s about creating the conditions that allow millions of people to remain healthy before they ever need a doctor.

I’ve often written that the patient is the environment. The longer I practice medicine, the less that feels like a metaphor.

The Greatest Trick Climate Change Ever Pulled

There is an old saying, popularized by Charles Baudelaire and later made famous by the film The Usual Suspects, that “the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” It’s a wonderful line because it captures the power of deception. But the more I’ve thought about climate change, the more I’ve come to believe it accomplished something even more remarkable. It didn’t convince us it wasn’t happening. It convinced us that living inside it was normal.

That isn’t the same thing.

Most Americans no longer deny that the climate is changing.²⁸ The debate has quietly shifted from whether it’s happening to what it means, how serious it is, and whether anything can realistically be done. In some ways that’s progress. In another, it reveals something deeply human. We have an extraordinary ability to adapt, even to circumstances that would have seemed unimaginable only a generation ago.

Imagine walking into a high school classroom in 1985 and announcing that, within forty years, parts of the United States would regularly experience temperatures above 120 degrees, wildfire smoke from Canada would turn the skies over New York City orange, billion-dollar weather disasters would become almost routine, insurance companies would begin abandoning entire neighborhoods because the risks had become too expensive to insure, and each year would seem determined to become the hottest ever measured. Nobody would have asked whether climate change was real. They would have assumed civilization itself had entered some kind of prolonged emergency.

Then imagine telling them that, after a while, people would mostly shrug. That may be the strangest part of this entire story.

Human beings are extraordinarily resilient. We have to be. If every tragedy retained its original emotional force forever, grief would never soften, fear would never fade, and none of us could continue living after profound loss. The same remarkable brain that learns to ignore the refrigerator humming in the kitchen, the train passing in the middle of the night, or the smell of the paper mill down the road also learns to ignore summers that are hotter than any in recorded history. What begins as astonishing gradually becomes familiar, and familiarity has an extraordinary ability to disguise danger.

As a psychiatrist, I spend much of my career helping people distinguish between real threats and imagined ones. Anxiety disorders convince people they are living in emergencies that don’t actually exist. Climate change presents the opposite problem. The emergency is real, but our emotional response slowly fades until the danger begins to feel like part of the landscape rather than something demanding our attention. The crisis hasn’t become smaller. Our capacity to be surprised has.

• Average atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration today: more than 425 parts per million, the highest level in millions of years.²⁹
• The last decade has been the warmest ever recorded globally.³⁰
• One of the most consistent findings in psychology is that people adapt emotionally to repeated experiences, even extraordinarily significant ones.³¹

Perhaps that’s the real lesson here. Climate change isn’t only transforming the planet; it’s revealing something profound about ourselves. The same adaptation that allows us to survive hardship can also prevent us from recognizing when hardship has quietly become the new normal. We didn’t stop talking about climate change because it became less important. We stopped talking about it because our brains did what human brains have always done.

They got used to it. And that may be the most dangerous adaptation of all.

Notes and Sources

1. George Carlin. Complaints and Grievances. HBO, 2001.

2. Recent examples include the 2023 Canadian wildfire smoke affecting much of North America, repeated catastrophic flooding in the United States and Europe, prolonged droughts, and insurance companies reducing or withdrawing coverage from high-risk regions.

3. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Climate Change 2023: Synthesis Report. Sixth Assessment Report (AR6), 2023.

4. World Meteorological Organization. State of the Global Climate reports, 2023–2025.

5. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters Database.

6. Friston K. “The free-energy principle: a unified brain theory?” Nature Reviews Neuroscience. 2010;11:127-138. See also literature on predictive coding and habituation.

7. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Ten Great Public Health Achievements — United States, 1900–1999.

8. American Cancer Society. Health Risks of Smoking Tobacco.

9. American Heart Association. Hypertension (”the silent killer”) educational materials.

10. United States Environmental Protection Agency. History of Leaded Gasoline and Lead Phase-Out.

11. Thompson RF, Spencer WA. “Habituation: A Model Phenomenon for the Study of Neuronal Substrates of Behavior.” Psychological Review. 1966.

12. Bill Hicks. Relentless. 1992.

13. Nielsen. Annual media consumption reports.

14. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters Database.

15. Kahneman D. Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 2011. See also cognitive psychology literature on attentional limitations.

16. Ziva Kunda. “The Case for Motivated Reasoning.” Psychological Bulletin. 1990.

17. Stephan Lewandowsky, Ecker UKH, Cook J. Research on misinformation, belief perseverance, and science denial.

18. Pew Research Center. Public opinion surveys on climate change. See also Yale Program on Climate Change Communication.

19. Dan M. Kahan. Research on cultural cognition and identity-protective reasoning.

20. Henri Tajfel and John Turner. Social Identity Theory.

21. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; World Health Organization. Climate change, heat-related illness, cardiovascular disease, and kidney injury guidance.

22. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Climate Change and Health; vector-borne disease and pollen season resources.

23. American Psychiatric Association; World Health Organization. Climate change and mental health reports.

24. Burke M, González F, Baylis P, et al. “Higher temperatures increase suicide rates in the United States and Mexico.” Nature Climate Change. 2018. See also studies on heat and psychiatric emergencies.

25. National Weather Service; Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Heat-related mortality statistics.

26. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Climate and pollen season research.

27. Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre. Global Report on Internal Displacement.

28. Yale Program on Climate Change Communication; Pew Research Center. National surveys on climate attitudes.

29. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Global Monitoring Laboratory; atmospheric carbon dioxide observations.

30. World Meteorological Organization. State of the Global Climate reports.

31. Brickman P, Campbell DT. “Hedonic Relativism and Planning the Good Society.” In: Adaptation-Level Theory. 1971. See also Diener E, Lucas RE, Scollon CN. “Beyond the Hedonic Treadmill.” American Psychologist. 2006.