Comment on 15,000 Scientists Warn Society Could 'Collapse' This Century In Dire Climate Report
Nonameuser678@aussie.zone 11 months agoClimate change is a huge factor in why I’m not having children. So in that sense it plays its own role in this demographic cliff.
sj_zero 11 months ago
I've got a hypothesis about that on an anthropological side of things.
Is anxiety about climate change causing the demographic cliff, or is economic stress causing something primal in our minds to be terrified about ecological concerns?
Reality is that the environment is in better shape in western cities than it has been for centuries. Just 50 years ago many cities were horribly polluted in ways you could immediately see and smell (and in a lot of Chinese cities we get to see) and today they're in much better shape, but we're hunter gatherers and so when we feel like we're working too hard just to stay alive and we're not getting our basic needs met something kicks in where we wonder if nature, the provider of all we have, is in trouble.
It makes a lot of sense to me that we can sense that our lives are getting more difficult and so our hunter gatherer instincts are kicking in leading to anxiety about the ecology that provides for us. We would have had millions of years to hone such instincts, and the humans who didn't could have actually killed themselves off like yeast in strong wine.
FooBarrington@lemmy.world 11 months ago
It’s a bit weird that you’re looking for a psychological explanation while ignoring the obvious one: massive amounts of scientific analysis are pointing towards our environments changing at rates only seen during times of mass extinction. I’m not extrapolating economical issues to ecological concerns, I’m listening to people who have spent their whole lives studying these topics.
sj_zero 11 months ago
There's lots of scientific and mathematical evidence for a lot of threats. Some of those are much more imminent than climate change. Yet of all those things, it's this one thing, a long term threat that isn't going to fully manifest until after you're dead, and possibly after your kids are dead, that has captured the popular imagination.
I think it would be crazy not to look for a psychological explanation.
FooBarrington@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Could you list, say, 5 threats of similar danger that will likely occur before climate change manifests strongly enough to impact my life?