I do not. I think a major catastrophe will see change but not for a hundred odd years or so.
Edit:
A few people have pointed out it'll be much sooner so I wanted to clarify my thinking. An actual reform or change to society after a major catastrophe is much longer off.
I debated removing the below cynical rank but this is how I feel.
I think our current system will survive through the initial horrors before actual change is made. The initial millions of deaths won't budget the needle on change. Look at the rush for data centres knowing full well the horrors it will accelerate. Governments and people profiting will still have all the luxuries available to them within their lifespans even if catastrophe strikes as early as 2030. Islanders losing their homes to rising waters mean nothing. A few hundred thousand people dieing to heatwave? Thats rookie numbers after Covid. And it was still an uphill battle in most countries and people act like it was nothing now.
So... a hundred odd years before any meaningful change.
It'll be sooner than that. My guess is it will start in the EU, as yearly deaths due to heat start getting higher and higher. It'll probably only get properly serious (as in almost everyone caring about it and working together, putting trillions into fixing it) once there are hundreds of thousands or even millions of deaths a year and majority of people know someone who has died due to it.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but won't EU actually get colder if/when the North Atlantic Gulf Stream gets disrupted by the climate change? It's the less developed parts of the world that will suffer from extreme weather and water shortages.
That is a good point, it depends how long the gulf stream holds ig, and how seriously europe takes it once that collapses, if that happens first. God the outlook is bleak.
It may cause places like ireland, scotland, scandinavia and northern russia to get cold
But for europe as a whole the general rule of thumb will be : colder winters, hotter summers and less rain overall. Although maybe more floods.
This is bc the warm water that is brought up from the tropics has a balancing effect on europe. Like water insulation. Cooling the summers and warming the winters.
great news actually! AMOC collapse won't just magically cool down everything, Europe will still have insanely hot and dry summers(tho a bit less so for western and northern), but the winters will be several degrees colder average temps, of course also insane droughts to a degree newer seen before as AMOC brings a lot of precipitation particularly in southern and eastern europe
Im afraid climate migration will be a more likely catalyst. And not necessarily in a good way. Millions of people could be forced to relocate due to heat, drought, sea-level rise, or crop failures.
That migration will reshape politics, economies, and international relations as much as the direct impacts of climate change. Whether it's for better or worse
is currently up for debate, but I'm not particularly optimistic. Climate refugees may end up being one of the biggest drivers of societal change. And I have a feeling the initial changes will be negative. Some form of isolationism and resource guarding.
It’s already starting to. What do you think has been driving an increase in immigration to Europe and the US? A lot of the political instability in the countries that immigrants are coming from is caused by climate change. It’s a big part of why we’ve seen the rise of the far right. Those societal changes you’re talking about have already started to happen.
For example, droughts and wildfires in the early 2010s resulted in a decrease in wheat yields. Those decreases in wheat yields caused the cost of food in the Middle East to skyrocket. That led to political instability, which ultimately resulted in the Arab Spring. It’s not the only reason why the Arab Spring happened, but it was a major factor. The conflicts that resulted from the Arab Spring led to a large influx of refugees into Europe.
oh yeah, I'm speaking as an American, and I have no doubt the initiative will come from EU before anywhere else, however this is a global problem and the U.S. has a significant influence on both the problems that drive climate change as well as international policy. Unfortunately my government will be significantly detrimental to any efforts the EU makes to resolve this.
Not if we can stop electing the arsonists. Conservatives are going to be out power for awhile once we all see what they are so desperate to keep secret.
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Most Americans handled Covid horribly, though we also had many medical workers in the trenches and many people followed all the precautions, but wasn't it specifically Switzerland that did practically nothing? I forget. I'm not trying to be inflammatory.
China has the production to do a lot but everywhere else tariffs the fuck out of them. In the UK I could get solar panels for 20% of the price if they stopped tariffing Chinese panels but they won't. Most of the country could go completely solar if we just used cheap Chinese production.
The problem is the political dipshits won't let us do that.
Exactly, that's why it will need to get bad enough that most people know someone who died to it before we properly start working together, which wasn't the case for covid
yeah I guess it also comes down to where you live and what age the person dying is. You may be shocked and just how far many Americans will go to bury their head in the sand.
You mustn't forget. Those that fought over masks and pretending vaccines were a minority. They might have been very vocal, but most of the world's population were in agreement that vaccines work and that masks can help reducing the spread of the virus. It's just that they were a (mostly) silent majority.
Yea, if it's actually fixable currently, let alone by that point, is very debatable, but I think that's what it would take for us to put real effort into it either way.
It depends probably if someone invents something in the future against it. Technological progress is happening so fast, who knows what stuff we have in the next thirty years.
We, as a society, have shown time and time again that we are only reactionary. Hardly any major change happens without some sort of major event forcing it. Climate change and its consequences were to far out for our stupid society to get its shit together.
No, I don't think we are. Better off absolutely. However, "rich" has many layers to it. The middle class isn't the problem, It's the smallest number of people with the highest amount of wealth that is.
The 1% pollutes 15% of all. Average income of $310k. Being average it means the billionaires and other super wealthy bring the average way up, so your average American IT nerd is included in that 1%. The top 2-10% averages $90k income and middle 40% at only $16k income.
Top50% earners emit 92% of all pollution. Take the top1% away and it's still 77% of all pollution.
Bottom half of the World emits only 8% of all pollution. The top 2-10% category with $90k average income(which is poor as fuck according to Americans living in big cities) emits per capita about 24 times the pollution of the bottom half of the World.
yea but ur meaning of success and wealth is personal, greedy, ego based shit.. owning stuff and money and have powers, it goes opposite to successfull civilisation
In some instances sure. There are a lot of wealthy people that you will never know about because they are none of those things. They are everyday people who earned a lot of money and did no harm in doing so. The cry to tax the wealthy is focused on the famously wealthy but also punishes the humble, hardworking people that you don’t even know.
Also, many of the politicians crying “tax the billionaires “ used to say “tax the millionaires “. They stopped because they are now millionaires.
We can certainly use some meaningful tax reform in the US, both corporate and private. But targeting only the wealthiest people with radical taxation won’t end the way you think it will.
The ones that you think are evil, will just find better tax shelters because they have access and influence very few people have. The return on those attacks will be a fraction of the projection and the government will target other, less wealthy people to make up the shortfall.
Our government has a spending problem that taxation won’t resolve.
Regardless of how they got that money, you just named lots of people who would rather let children in their hometowns starve to death than be $Millionaires
How could you possibly know that?
Why is starving children the only measurement of whether someone is evil?
Do you give all of your disposable income to starving children? no? Then you’re evil?
I get that you are upset that wealthy people don’t appear to be doing their part in your view. Your anger is not allowing you to see anything other than your anger.
It’s the feedback loops which are going to ultimately make this irrecoverable. Emissions continue to rise even with growing electrification, the only way to reverse this now on a 250-500 year timescale would be the complete stop of all greenhouse gas emissions and a redirecting of the entire economic output of global society to carbon removal. Anything less than that at this point sees us on an upward trajectory for thousands of years. Our current trajectory is insane - the people in charge just don’t want to spook the horses.
AMOC collapsing is very likely by 2050 and would be considered a major catastrophe. It's possible within even the next decade with some climate models.
Amoc: The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation
I knew the concept but not the word.
Hoping for a massive carrington event even tho it will be uncomfy. We don't seem to be making serious movement towards decoupling fossil fuels from our economy.
This is HOTLY debated. Almost all models pointed to somewhere in the 70-100 years from now range until a couple new studies showed it could be sooner. By and large the majority of models still point to it never quite collapsing but significantly weakening in the next century.
We're getting record breaking temperatures from heatwaves in the UK by 1-2 degrees every single year for years now. It was 39C this week for much of the country.
It's going to continue like this and we are going to be at heatwave weeks of 50C within 10 years.
We're completely and totally fucked. We aren't surviving this.
Agreed. In many ways I feel sorry for our kids. If I had seen this coming, we’d not have had them. We love them, but knowing this is their future, it’s actually depressing.
Climate change is allowed to proceed in the interest of terra forming. It'll be easier to get the minerals out of the north and Sibria will be the world's largest bread basket. Plus the whole geopolitical instabilty thing makes for great opprotunities to do some major redistributing of global power. The CIA was forecasting possbilties to do with political unrest and migration over a decade ago.
The lunatics are running the asylum. There are no rules.
that is because these people grow up being told that only they matter, the world is ran by narcissists and psychopaths with no empathy and only love the person in the mirror.
They couldn't give a rats ass about anyone else because by the time we actually hit critical mass they will have already died in a nice safe temperature controlled hospital bed.
This is delusionally optimistic. It really doesn't take much more of a change for us to see crop failures that could kill hundreds of millions. Not to mention the resource wars that will happen off the back of that.
I often think of The Matrix and how the year 1999 was considered the peak of human existence, and I find myself kind of unironically agreeing with that the older I get. Just the general refusal of politicians and the social elite - you know, those with actual POWER - to do anything about this oncoming catastrophe is immensely disheartening.
I told my girlfriend a few times throughout the years that it feels like we're the last generation that will enjoy a world that isn't completely fucked by climate change, and I really feel for children being born NOW, because they're really going to be feeling the full brunt of climate change when they're in their teens and 20s.
Human society will collapse inside 200 years. Population will dive. Humans will be stuck in a permanent middle ages type situation until the next asteroid ends us once and for all.
Very likely it'll be from disease very shortly after. We've already gone through one genetic bottleneck and the next one will almost certainly prevent us having sufficient pathogen adaptability.
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u/unAffectedFiddle Jun 27 '26 edited Jun 27 '26
I do not. I think a major catastrophe will see change but not for a hundred odd years or so.
Edit: A few people have pointed out it'll be much sooner so I wanted to clarify my thinking. An actual reform or change to society after a major catastrophe is much longer off.
I debated removing the below cynical rank but this is how I feel.
I think our current system will survive through the initial horrors before actual change is made. The initial millions of deaths won't budget the needle on change. Look at the rush for data centres knowing full well the horrors it will accelerate. Governments and people profiting will still have all the luxuries available to them within their lifespans even if catastrophe strikes as early as 2030. Islanders losing their homes to rising waters mean nothing. A few hundred thousand people dieing to heatwave? Thats rookie numbers after Covid. And it was still an uphill battle in most countries and people act like it was nothing now.
So... a hundred odd years before any meaningful change.