This chart illustrates a staggering fact: The last 30 years have yielded four times as many weather-related disasters as the first three quarters of the 20th century combined. Tornadoes, hurricanes, wildfires, floods. You might say that the earth is throwing ominous tantrums.

Unfortunately, our reaction to such natural outbursts – as well as to the problems of skewed data on CO2 emissions, resource annihilation, and latent toxicity in our land and water – hasn't spiked nearly as dramatically. Instead, we seem content to simply refine our existing patterns of consumption. If a mass-produced plastic label promises that a product is "green", we'll likely buy it and feel satisfied for having done our part.

We may owe our collective lack of environmental consciousness to the convenience of invisibility. We dispose of our waste in neat receptacles, rarely bearing witness to its grim deterioration. We marvel at the efficiency of the industrialized world yet seldom glimpse the colossal infrastructures that make such modern efficiencies possible.

But the taxing effects of the Western lifestyle are becoming more globally conspicuous than ever. And yet still, we're largely unable to admit to the problem. Perhaps the world is experiencing a complex state of collective denial?

American sociologist Kari Mari Norgaard recently spent a year in Bygdaby, a rural Norwegian community with a population of 14,000, where she interviewed locals about their perceptions and reactions to climate change. Though Bygdaby's inhabitants were surrounded by overwhelming evidence of global warming (abnormally high temperatures, an unfrozen lake, late snowfall and flooding), they tended to selectively "normalize" this knowledge and maintain distance from the issue by "participating in cultural norms and using a series of interpretative narratives to deflect disturbing information." In other words, the inhabitants of Bygdaby denied the problem despite the fact that they were directly confronted with its effects and, given their simplified rural lifestyles, likely bore only incidental responsibility for its existence. The bulk of accountability lies on the overgrown shoulders of the urbanized West where, having effectively rid our lives of nature, we are shielded from the effects global warming on the natural world.

As Norgaard notes in the study's conclusion: "Societal inequality helps to perpetuate environmental degradation, making it easier to displace visible outcomes and costs across borders of time and space, out of the way of those citizens who are most politically able to respond." In other words, while the citizens of a less destructive world are punished by the effects of our bad behavior, we in the industrialized West can go on about our way – ignoring a problem that is conveniently invisible.