No Stupid Questions

There will never be some collective epiphany that turns everyone into a climate activist, so business as usual.

There'd still be denial.

Conservatives will never admit they are wrong if that’s what you’re asking.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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 ~~king~~ capitalist 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:

1. gurgle, gulp, drowning noises
2. ah, oh no, gunshots, silence
3. so hot today, ugh, sound of body hitting ground, silence
4. "That fire isn't so close yet!" burning sounds, screaming, silence

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.

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.

Apathy. It's already going full swing.

You ever heard of the boiling frog analogy? Yeah, that.

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- .... "

1. Action
2. Apathy
3. Panic

We are in the apathy stage right now.

Line from Unforgiven

Kid, “He had it coming, didn’t he?”

Muny, “We’ve all got it coming, kid”

When Americans do? Shut the border to climate change refugees. Keep on trucking.

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.

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.

1. Lots of wars and refugee crises.
2. Almost certainly unilateral moves by middle-sized nations seeing existential crises to inject albedo-altering aerosols into the stratosphere.
3. 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.