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.
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.
Conservatives will never admit they are wrong if that’s what you’re asking.
Oh man, just wait till they pin it on the libtards causing crop failures and storms and flooding all because they didn’t persecute people enough and didn’t hand out enough free money to billionaires.
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.
That’s why I provided the ranges I was able to find.
“I was able to find something that aligned with my assertion”
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.
Some areas might even get more habitable!
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.
To where? Like where you gonna go that is more suitable than where we already are? You gonna rocketship your ass to Mars? Cause even with global warming earth is still more hospitable than a rocky desert with no oxygen. A bigass bank account with lots of zeros isn’t gonna keep anyone out of the we’re collectively fucked line. Sure it might get you a spot at the back of the line, but we’re all getting in it together no matter who you are.
To New Zealand, apparently: “New Zealand, Iceland, the UK, Tasmania and Ireland are the places best suited to survive a global collapse of society, according to a study”
I guarantee we’ll all be underwater before you can get to us
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.
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.
Oligarchs funding a resurgence of fascism in order to protect the global system that is wrecking the environment, successfully it seems.
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.
It’s going to be so hard not to deck the person who will eventually say “it was all a part of God’s plan”
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.)
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.
The quietus pills from children of men haunt me.
I’m doing all three every day. doom scrolling intensifies
Really, I think you nailed it as far as the three categories of reactions go. Of course, the manifestations will be as varied as humans are.
I’m working towards building intentional community that’s equipped to help it’s members and hopefully neighbors to get through. But that’s because I’m a super-privileged north american who is located in what I consider one of the least-likely-to-be-unlivable spots. Other than the unpleasantness of the collapse of society, I’m just hoping that climate refugees don’t decide to come murder us all for our resources.
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.
Consequences are happening now, cat 5 hurricane hit Acapulco Mexico and destroyed the city.
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.For the vast majority of (American) people, their reaction to the true realization of climate change is going to be one of:
- gurgle, gulp, drowning noises
- ah, oh no, gunshots, silence
- so hot today, ugh, sound of body hitting ground, silence
- “That fire isn’t so close yet!” burning sounds, screaming, silence
Or as we call it in America, Tuesday. It’s already here, people don’t realize it. People already have acclimated to “wildfire season,” for example, a thing that didn’t exist until the last 5 years or so in this area, as a totally normal occurrence.
Gotta remind myself I grew up in a doomsday cult and most people didn’t have go bags in their garage their entire childhood.
Don’t forget starvation, that’s a big one. Climate change hits your food supply before it hits you.
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 output 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 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.
