There will never be some collective epiphany that turns everyone into a climate activist, so business as usual.
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There'd still be denial.
Don't look up.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
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.)
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.
Revolutions happen, they happen fast, and then they spread.
And right before, even though everyone is angry, they also swear its impossible. That the ~~king~~ capitalist state can't be defeated.
Consequences are happening now, cat 5 hurricane hit Acapulco Mexico and destroyed the city.
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.
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.
Apathy. It's already going full swing.
You ever heard of the boiling frog analogy? Yeah, that.
Don't have kids.
Withdraw from being politically active and concentrate on short term fulfillement while it lasts.
Don't bother with long term planning or worry too much about pensions or career advancement.
The Chinese concept of "lying flat" in response to immense amounts of insignificant, monotonous work.
This is already me.
Chaos. Pandemonium. Mayhem.
By the time we're feeling the full effects, it's too late to mute them. We need to be acting now. and I think the general population knows it. Even if they're unwilling to mutter the words 'climate change' or 'global warming' or admit that it's a problem.
Like a conversation I had with my grandma:
"it's so weird. we've had... [sites really weird weather that's happening local to her]..."
"You think that might be because the climate is changing?"
"No! climates don't change- .... "
- Action
- Apathy
- Panic
We are in the apathy stage right now.
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.
I think we're already starting to see some climate wars kick off.
they don't call them as such, as yet. but I think resources are definitely becoming an issue.
Oh yeah, the climate wars will absolutely start before we even know they are the climate wars, that's basically a fact.
When Americans do? Shut the border to climate change refugees. Keep on trucking.
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”
Eventually the gulf stream will collapse causing a mini-ice age, making northern Europe comparatively cold to the Pacific North West, for one, moving the arable/habitable band down towards Africa.
After that? Who knows honestly.
Normalcy bias for sure. Just like at the start of covid.
I think we can already seethe consequences. Not fully, maybe, but we do. So whatever people are dping right now: some would be spurred to action, some will panic, some will go to denial nd act as kf all is as it should be (or as you called it, apathy). And some will try their hardest to make as much money as possible while they can despite the consequences.
Imo, nothing and if asked: blame others.
Not much.
We can easily solve climate change. We have the technological capability to do it.
Once it gets bad enough, we will solve it.
Probably with cooling stratospheric aerosols for a few years to buy some extra time to make up for the lost time of the last three decades.
The only way to solve climate change is to make it more profitable for businesses than pollution. That's it. That's the only way that humans can solve the problem.
As with 95% of human problems, it comes down to eradicating greed. Which is a problem humanity can never solve. As long as humans exist, greed will cause them to mistreat other humans and anything else that stands between them and whatever they are greedy for. Power, money, posessions, whatever.
I hope you are right, but I don’t bet on it.
- Lots of wars and refugee crises.
- Almost certainly unilateral moves by middle-sized nations seeing existential crises to inject albedo-altering aerosols into the stratosphere.
- Depending on the timing of things in the next few decades we may be in an ice age very quickly from ice cap melt acceleration cooling the ocean. In an ice age the amount of arable land would dramatically decrease and if there is a harvest season at all it will be very short. Nearly everyone would starve.
People know. But they're comfortable, and they see any change as a threat.
They won’t care because the right kind of people (nonwhite, nonChristian people in less developed countries) will suffer first.
All of the above.