I often wonder how the general population will react when they truly realize the impacts of climate change. I’d imagine there could be three reactions:
- Apathy, as in completely shutting down
- Panic, as in severe mental breakdown
- Action, protesting etc Now that I think of it these are the fight, flight, freeze reactions. Any thoughts?
People believe what they’re told. Our department of truth will whip up good explanations right up to the point that you burn/drown/starve.
There will never be some collective epiphany that turns everyone into a climate activist, so business as usual.
First-world countries will be able to afford relocating farmland, building sea walls, and otherwise mitigating the effects of climate change. Once that gets too expensive, they will resort to geoengineering like deliberately releasing large amounts of sulfur into the atmosphere to reflect sunlight or crushing rock to speed up chemical weathering that traps atmospheric carbon dioxide as limestone. People might wish that they had reduced carbon dioxide output in the past, but reducing carbon dioxide in the present will remain unappealing. Even the absolute worst-case scenario, a return to the climate of the Cretaceous period when all the world’s ice had melted and large regions of the continents (not just the coasts) were flooded, would not be the end of technological civilization.
People in poorer countries will not be able to afford such mitigation but their suffering will be largely irrelevant to global climate policy.
During this whole time almost no one denying climate change now will admit to making a mistake.
People know. But they’re comfortable, and they see any change as a threat.
You ever heard of the boiling frog analogy? Yeah, that.
Apathy for as long as possible, then outright panic when it no longer is.
People who are unlucky or dumb enough to own property in an obviously bad place (like the desert or coast) will see its value drop like a rock (of course, the rich won’t care as much, because that was only their vacation home anyway). People won’t really shit their pants until groceries start to become scarce and/or unaffordable. That’ll be a major problem. As people gradually realize that their situation is hopeless, the government will have a harder and harder time maintaining order.
Has anyone seen the movie Children of Men? I expect that, at some point, everyday life will be like the beginning of that movie (I’m imagining the main characters’ bus ride to work, where he watches riot police beat people up from behind his bus window that’s covered with a metal grate.)
The quietus pills from children of men haunt me.
Has anyone seen the movie Children of Men?
The final scene with Bexhill immigration camp getting bombed may have been the best depiction in film of Palestine right now.
They won’t care because the right kind of people (nonwhite, nonChristian people in less developed countries) will suffer first.
Dealing with it.
Weather gets hotter, more people get A/C. Disasters get more frequent, more people get fucked by disasters.
Areas become less habitable, some people die, some people deal, some people flee. Migration gets more pressing? Borders get closed with increasingly violent measures.
We just had inflation make life 10% more expensive in many countries. Life went on. That’s about the impact of climate change people in “rich” western countries can expect from climate change, except it will happen more slowly.
As much as climate doomers would hope for collapse, climate change is a slow moving disaster. Humans are adaptable, especially when there is time to adapt. Even the more pessimistic among the realistic/scientific predictions are on the “life will get X% worse” side, not “doom, we all die, no food no water” side.
This ignores how interconnected our logistics is on a global scale. As other nations devolve into war, not only between themselves but against the west as well of we try to stop the migration, the world logistics will get severely disrupted, from food, to resources, to everything else. How will that look?
The west is not immune to serious consequences, and it is very likely we will see living conditions severely worsen to the point of mass unrest as well. The chaos very much will end up being global.
You mentioned the high inflation, and that “life goes on”… but does it? Or does it push more and more people to the breaking point, leading to more and more dysfunctional societies, planting the seeds for serious future unrest?
These things do happen over long periods… but they do happen. I won’t pretend to know how the future will look like, but it is far too early to say that things turned out fine.
Countries with resources won’t have a reason to “devolve into war”. Countries without resources won’t affect much beyond that country. Why would logistics get disrupted?
I also think you’re overestimating the effect. Optimistic studies claim something like 8% impact in 2100, pessimistic 18% in 2050, which is a tiny effect per year.
Again, humanity deals well with slow changes. We’re mostly talking about “the economy grows by one percentage-point less quickly than it would without climate change” for the worst affected countries in the absolutely worst long term estimates (something like -65% by 2100), and a fraction of that for most countries. Just to be clear, we’re not talking about “x% less than now”, we’re talking about “x% less than it would have been without climate change”. It’s likely that over time, despite climate change, the standard of living even in those countries will continue to increase, unless they, as you said, devolve into (internal/local) wars for mostly unrelated reasons.
I don’t think there’s consensus on the numbers you’re quoting.
That’s why I provided the ranges I was able to find.
It’s refreshing to see something other than the usual perspectives “The world will end”, “Humans will die out, but nature will be fine”, “waterwars” or “There’s gonna be more immigrants”.
This narrative sounds nice and makes me feel safe, it must be true.
Your first paragraph doesn’t really make much sense. The countries with natural resources are almost all poor countries. Africa is very rich in resources, which the wealthy nations import. Do you even know where most of our resources come from? Especially for advanced technologies like electronics?
And, again, you’re ignoring agriculture being disrupted. This is the most critical industry which is at high risk to be seriously damaged by climate change. We have already started to see the consequences, look at India stopping export of grain due to droughts, for example.
I don’t get where you get your sources of the worst affected countries, because the worst thing that can happen is crop destruction on a mass scale leading to a famine. That can easily destroy a country, and it has in the past.
Countries have been devolving into chaos before climate change. Climate change goes on top of everything else, exacerbating current problems and starting chain-reactions of consequences. The world has been growing more unstable in recent times, what do you think will happen when more fuel is thrown at the powder keg?
Thinking that we will be fine through climate change if we don’t do anything very soon is straight up delusional. There is so much that can go wrong.
- Action
- Apathy
- Panic
We are in the apathy stage right now.
People will slip from denial to acceptance because, by the time the vast majority of people realise it’s as bad as the scientists have been saying, it’ll be far too late to do anything other than scramble for the last rocketship off the planet.
Revolutions happen, they happen fast, and then they spread.
And right before, even though everyone is angry, they also swear its impossible. That the
kingcapitalist state can’t be defeated.Well billions of people will die, but not likely the ones reading this. The ones reading this will quietly keep the others from getting where we’re kept safer.
All of the above.
People will just slowly move to northerner places. When those get back, they’ll move again. Lots of borders will close. There will be some wars over the likes of Siberia but they won’t last.
Eventually people will run out of places to go too up norther, and they’ll just deny the existence of an issue.
Line from Unforgiven
Kid, “He had it coming, didn’t he?”
Muny, “We’ve all got it coming, kid”
