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?
There will never be some collective epiphany that turns everyone into a climate activist, so business as usual.
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.
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.
I don’t think there’s consensus on the numbers you’re quoting.
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”.
There’d still be denial.
This is where we are now and I don’t see it changing.
The weather here is fucked. It’s really different to 10 years ago, before that it was pretty much the same.
We get massive heat waves and record breaking temps every year. The once in a decade major storms now happen several times a year. We hardly get snow in parts of the country that used to get it every year.
We’re only mildly affected compared to many places.
Denial that humans have anything to do with it.
Severe crackdown on any sort of migration, which of course is incompatible with liberal democracies, so they’ll be replaced by autocracies of various sorts.
If you look closely, it’s already happening.
Controlling who can come and settle doesn’t make a state authoritarian.
Current day Switzerland is not Nazi Germany.
I’m primarily talking about pushbacks.
But any state that claims to protect human rights also must have a way to get asylum.
Missing that it’s in violation of international law and any liberal constitution that was formulated with the idea of human rights.
This is what democratic parties are unable to do, and in response we see all over the West the rise of right wing populist and extremist parties. Once in power they move to change the judicial system so they can unhindered crack down on human rights. of course they don’t stop with the crack down on migrants. The next group is always the gays, along with critical journalists. That doesn’t instantly instantiate tHe nAzIs, but it is an autocratic system where human rights are no concern to the whims of the political leadership.
I don’t know how far along Switzerland is in this process, but given that we see this happening basically all over Europe and in the US it’s hard to imagine that it’s not happening there.
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.)
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.
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.Probably a lot of people are going to be like “why didn’t anyone do anything about this???”, completely forgetting that’s happening right now, with likely the same people being climate deniers.
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.
I think were gonna see climate wars kick off before any kind of mass realization happens.
One of the real issues that people will see the immediate impacts of is increased migration. People will not be able to live in coastal areas, Pacific Islands or near the equator.
It’s already happened in S.America with convoys of people on foot trying to get to better places but the spin has always been these are illegals and nothing more.
Line from Unforgiven
Kid, “He had it coming, didn’t he?”
Muny, “We’ve all got it coming, kid”
People believe what they’re told. Our department of truth will whip up good explanations right up to the point that you burn/fry/starve.
Adapt and put serious pressure on reform. Its important to remember Corporations and governments aren’t evil, they’re self interested just like the human beings that made and run them. They will be much more willing to make drastic change when the impacts of climate change knocks on their door and starts affecting their bottom line. Its hard to make a profit or collect taxes when everyone is either dead or revolting and that’s all they really care about.
Let’s not ignore the fact that there is some progress. The ozone is slowly healing last I saw. Carbon emission checks are decently enforced. The general population is taking climat e change more seriously compared to the al gore days, and most developed countries are moving towards cleaner renewable energy as it makes more economic sense.
Hot take but many climate advocates tend to be hyperbolic and reactionary doomsday worshippers who think this timeline is the worst possible. There were people 20 years ago saying we should all be under the ocean or in a complete hellscape by now. Guess what, the planet has been through a lot worse than us and both it and life in general Is a little more resilient than what fearmongers might think. Things aren’t great right now, but but they aren’t beyond hope either.
In case I sound likr aclimate denying right winger, I do my part to cut down on my personal emissions. I live off solar power completely, I make sure all my clothing and cloth is hemp, and I don’t drive unless its really needed. I take farmers baths more often than showers to cut down on water usage. I try to buy used things. I burn a clean fuel for heating my shelter. That’s probably more thought and effort than most people on Lemmy whining about the environment. Yeah its mostly corporations doing the emissions but we as individuals arent faultless either. The corpos wouldn’t existing we didn’t constantly desire convinence and trinkets.
