Slow Apocalypse

Climate change is sometimes described as an existential threat to humanity. One of the reasons we are slow to respond to the threat of climate change is because of the way we describe it.

Apocalypse on the other hand tends to grab our attention ... apocalypse being the term used to describe the end of humanity as we know it.

In the spirit of full disclosure, we are followers of apocalyptic novels. Novelists in this genre offer highly imaginative stories ranging from nuclear war, alien invasion, pandemic infections, to meteor strikes. The works we tend to read are the less fantasy-based and more science-based. Fewer zombies, more celestial bodies.

Most of these works of fiction move quickly. Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck take a nuclear warhead up in a rocket to blow up an asteroid before it hits the earth. A heroic scientist injects herself with a potential cure for a global virus to prove it works. To keep us reading, these novels need to keep the action moving.

Unless we postulate some new scientific theory, as in the movie Day after Tomorrow, climate change usually makes for a boring novel. 

Why is humanity moving so slowly to respond to climate change? Some reasons can be found in social sciences that look at the way people respond to threats. The Normalcy Bias, which causes humans to think nothing bad is going to happen,¹ is one of the reasons people delay responding to emergencies or appear calm, as when people delay evacuation from fire or flood. People also generally have a bias for positive information and avoid thinking about or dealing with negatives. This is called the Ostrich effect ².

Today's society has generally agreed that the planet is warming and that humans are causing it, but we agree on neither the consequences, nor the timing for those consequences. The slow-moving and unclear existential threat of climate change is difficult for us to respond to, given our human nature. Yes, some of us will still worry about it, many will continue to do research and studies, and some people will take action, but the majority of people in the world will do nothing.  They need the threat to become more imminent and tangible. 

If your house were destroyed by urban wildfire, or if you were flooded for the third time in five years, or if you were unable get a mortgage to buy a house in your city ... all would make the reality of climate change real. 

The risk with slow responses is that —before humanity decides to act in a meaningful way— they may be too late. The Earth will have warmed to a point where a series of cascading climate changes will become irreversible. Now THOSE are apocalypse novels that make for great reads. Some scientists have suggested that once a 2º C rise in global temperatures occurs, we will begin to see these effects. But with no consensus there is little impetus to act. 

Until we reach a consensus, some of us will keep working on understanding climate change and –with luck— can make the consequences understood in a way that lets humanity react. We are considering writing our own climate change apocalypse novel. Hopefully we can get it done before reality scoops us.

Reading

1. The Decision Lab. “Normalcy Bias.” Accessed February 15, 2025. https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/normalcy-bias?utm_source=chatgpt.com.
2. The Decision Lab. “Ostrich Effect.” Accessed February 15, 2025. https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/ostrich-effect.