What a species we are. Utterly oblivious, for the most part, to what is coming. I think if you asked a thousand people, randomly selected, to say what the atmospheric concentration is, give or take 5ppm, you’d get, what maybe 10 or 20 that got it right.
If you asked the same thousand about the amount by which temperature records were being broken, same numbers. Unless you are actively switched on to the Twitter feeds, or are being paid to study this stuff, then you’re going to be ignorant. The media is unwilling/unable to focus.
So far, so banal.
I am wondering instead, about how we explain these failures to ourselves.
For some the last 35 years are simply what you get with neo-liberal capitalism – a wilful discounting of the future (asset stripping it, in fact) and denial of the existence of externalities or limits.
For others it will be capitalism full-stop. It’s not as if there wasn’t massive exploitation/exhaustion before then.
For others it will be growth, imperialism, colonialism, patriarchy etc.
All compelling cases. I guess what amuses/baffles me is the ways in which “democracy” and “facts” were simply no match for physics and organised denial.
We as individuals are frail frail beings, prone to distraction, despair. We cannot, most of us, look into the abyss for very long without looking away. It used to be that we had Organised Religion (OR), for all its very many sins) to structure the looking. Of course, OR could also get you to look away – see how so many evangelical Christians in the US are climate sceptics/deniers. But in those countries where OR has been replaced/supplanted/seriously challenged it hasn’t been replaced with structures that allow individuals to have a situational awareness (military term) roughly inline with reality. It’s been replaced by… the boob tube and the interwebz (the boob tube on steroids).
And there aren’t the structuring organisations – civil society, social movements, whatever – that can help people channel their knowledge, their hopes and fears, for a long-term vision of some sort of lessening of our millennia-long war on nature. The closest we come to structuring organisations, still, are the trades unions still romanticised by those on the “left.” But the TUs are fighting simply to keep their members’ heads above water, pushing back at neoliberalism’s successful assault.
Overcoming the co-ordination problems is, to me, literally unimaginable. This is especially so given that we can’t even get the smallest things – place-based organisations that fight for basic transparency and honesty – alive. They fold. So, if we can’t sort out the brown M&Ms, why on earth do we belief we can safely organise a stadium tour?
We had the freedom of speech/assembly/information. The problem was not these (at least for middle-class white people). The problem was the ability to create, sustain and extend civil society organisations that could challenge the trajectory and momentum of state-corporate extractivism.
Now, I know I am sounding like an undergraduate who has read too much Klein (Naomi, not Melanie) and a little James Dyke or James Lovelock.
But here we are, with the emissions surging, and the temperature rises “gobsmackingly bananas”.
Here. We. Are. But not for long, I suspect.
marchudson.net 
Marc, you are correct, the bulk of the worlds population has little specific knowledge regarding Climate Change even if they believe in it. The priorities for most as I’ve mentioned before, are family, food and accommodation. This is why year after year WE elect the same type of people to ‘lead’ us.
Until such tike as people can be encouraged to look beyond family, food and accommodation nothing will change.