[Fornax96]

The hardest part for me to accept is that there are so many people who just don't care. Not about the disasters, the climate refugees, the death toll, the extinction of thousands of species, respiratory diseases, etc.

How can people just accept all that as a fact of life when it's all man-made horrors?

[AnimalMuppet]

I'm not sure that you're being fair to (many) people.

There are many people to whom this is all doomerism. The world is ending because of ozone depletion. The world is ending because of the oil shortage. The world is ending because of nuclear war. The world is ending because of resource depletion. The world is ending because of topsoil depletion. The world is ending because of aquafer depletion. And now, the world is ending because of climate change. (Yes, climate change figures in several of the other issues...)

People hear all this. And they look around and they see not much actually changing. It's not that they don't care about millions of deaths; they don't believe that the millions of deaths are coming. They think that, yeah, the climate's going to change a bit, and it's going to disrupt things a bit, just like oil got kind of scarce for a while and gasoline got expensive, and that was painful, but we got through it.

It's not that they don't care. It's that they don't believe (and therefore don't care about an outcome that they don't believe in). For many people, slow motion decades-in-the-making doom is not something that feels real, even when it starts to happen.

[jowea]

I don't think we humans were made to think like that. Almost everyone mostly wants to live their lives and has just enough mental energy to care about problems in front of them.

[smeej]

To add to that, for the huge numbers of people who wouldn't be able to ride out a $1,000 emergency without going into debt, who feel like they're not even the primary causal agents in their own lives, the prospect of being able to have any sort of impact on the whole planet is absurd, even if they do have the bandwidth to think about it. They don't have an experience of, "When I decide something should be different, I have the ability to do anything that could actually bring that difference about."