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?
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.