this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2025
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As someone who understands climate science pretty well (I took university level classes within my earth science major) understand my words carefully, hyperbole is an extinct fear and the climate experts we desperately need have been so systematically disempowered that there is no one left with any power to speak with the urgency this moment demands.
This is no longer about even saving people or the environment, rather it is about letting people know in 15 years max and that is generous their quality of life is going to drop through the floor.
People won't listen because they've heard something similar for decades now, and for most people in the western world they haven't really experienced any decline in QoL due to global warming.
I understand the spirit of your point, but I don't think it is true. If there is one thing that defines the western world at this point I think it might be refusal to acknowledge a clearly plummeting QoL.
We have all already experienced major quality of life reductions from climate change, more are coming.
I have not experienced any QoL reductions due to global warming. Not any that affects me in a noticeable negative way anyways.
Which reductions in QoL are you thinking of?
Okay, here's one right off the top of my head. How about high insurance premiums and high electricity bills that eat into your budget?
Electricity was high a few years back when the Ukraine / Russia war started but since then it's back to a regular level..
My ac is running on 23c from 8 in the morning and till I return around 16-17 in the afternoon, which should tell you how much I worry about energy prices.
Really, you aren't experiencing the increased cost of living?
No.
Edit: Not to an extent that it has lowered my QoL at least. I realize groceries have gone up but so has wages where I live.
...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S22
https://www.niehs.nih.gov/research/programs/climatechange/health_impacts
And none of that has had a noticeable effect on my QoL or any of the people I know, that I've talked to about this subjects since I read this post.
Climate change has made farming more difficult and expensive, which has lead to more subsidies, which has to be expressed as taxes and government loans, which is distributed over the entirety of right-wingers cutting federal expenses and centrists failing to replace them. The same story holds true for other industries, whether it's the cost to keep sweatshop workers from dying, the cost to grow cotton, the cost to replace services destroyed by forest fires or hurricanes or floods, etc. Capitalism finds alternative routes, but these always cost more. This directly affects your quality of life, but in a distributed stochastic way that you can't directly point to.
So maybe you've suffered from longer waiting periods in the justice system, maybe you're annoyed that inflation has wiped out a considerable portion of your purchasing power (whether capital or income), maybe a lack of infrastructure maintenance has caused potholes or train delays, maybe you could have gotten a well-paying job as a high speed rail engineer or some other forward-looking government project that was never funded, maybe you got food poisoning because FDA checks got cut, maybe the covid restrictions could have stayed in effect longer and someone you know wouldn't have gotten sick or died.
It's like a cruise ship that is taking on water, with all the ship's engineers focused on keeping the ship as stable and upright as possible rather than patching the hole or bailing out the water. They work harder and harder until at some point not even the full might of our regulations and charity and hoarded resources are able to keep it steady. And then everything goes wrong at once.
I should probably have said that I'm Danish and not American, so that may be why people are so confused about me not experiencing a decline in QoL