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?
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.
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”.
