Most Americans have difficulty comprehending exponential growth. A few years ago Dr. Albert A. Bartlett professor emeritus of the University of Colorado at Boulder explained it well in this video entitled "Arithmetic Population and Energy".
The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function. The exponential function is used to describe the size of anything that is growing steadily, for example at 5% a year.
We are now in a position where we need to understand the difference between a steady arithmetic growth series and an accelerated geometric series of exponential growth in which the rate of change increases at an increasing rate.
When something doubles over a period of time the increase is more than everything that has gone before but that is still an example of steady growth.
Steady growth is usually graphed as a straight line to illustrate
a situation where the time required for the growing quantity to increase by a fixed fraction is constant
This is modeled by an arithmetic rather than a geometric series.
When the rate of increase increases at an increasing rate you get what scientists call a surprising acceleration and what mathematicians call a geometric series.
Modeled by a geometric rather than an arithmetric series you get a curve
With all existing observations of everything from population to climate change best modeled by curves you get graphs like these
Many times I see peoples comments in diaries about climate change expressing shock and dismay about how much faster its coming on than what they expected.
I see an expectation that there is or is not a solution to some particular problem such as that we keep putting more carbon in the atmosphere putting the responsibility on policies originated by governments or perhaps more properly corporate lobbyists.
That ignores the fact that 40% of us don't vote, or vote for a third party in protest of something Democrats or the President have done or failed to do.
We need to take personal responsibility to people about this and become organized and active ourselves not just blame politicians.
If we begin to get intense about it, to include finding solutions to limiting population as well as carbon in the atmosphere, to discuss what happens to population when more people are healthier and live longer, or there are fewer infant mortalities, or when responsible people don't have kids and irresponsible people do, and put some of the blame for bad policies on religious doctrines about family planning birth control and abortion maybe there are better situations we can work toward.