ccgwebmaster
I don't like the "how much people should be afraid" question? I think responses grounded in rational thought are more likely to be productive, especially with a situation that requires long term thinking.
Perhaps fear by itself is the wrong word. Could there be a balance point where people have enough concern/fear to move them to invest in long term thinking?
I wanted to stay away from purely scientific thresholds, like 400 PPM CO2. The system seems to have so much lag time and so much variability built into it, that such thresholds could be passed without immediate impact to individuals. I wanted to set thresholds that were more real/meaningful to the average person's awareness. Hence the idea of using the flooding of New York City as a threshold. More people are probably more aware of that incident and its impacts than melting arctic sea ice.
"Proportion of global population living in a socially collapsed environment" would be a great statistic if it existed and was a common household term. The food price index might be a great stat that does exist and perhaps could become more of a common household term.
I think young people are consumed with experiencing and achieving things in their life. Thus they care about climate change in terms of how much of a threat is it to them experiencing and achieving what they want to do.
Once they marry, and start a family, they care about their kids. And their kids care about experiencing and achieving things in their life. Thus family people have a huge push from their kids to keep everything going. They don't want to be the parents that deny their kids a significant part of life. So they keep everything going.
It is not until kids are grown and gone, and people start thinking about grandkids that they really start experientially caring about what the future will be like for future generations. But that only lasts for a brief window, which closes when they face getting through their own retirement/old age.
So people have this huge drive to fulfill their own experiences/achievements for themselves or for their kids.
Thus to make a lifestyle change, you have to prove it to them in their terms. It has to be in terms of life goals, experiences, and achievements for themselves and their kids.
Thus I think the flooding of New York City is a good threshold because:
- It is a place people could conceive of visiting. They could envision themselves going to a Broadway play, if the Broadway Theater were open. It is kind of hard to do that if the city is flooded.
- The same is true with showing the city to their kids, seeing the site of the World Trade Center, or UN headquarters, or Empire State Building or whatever.
- They can conceive of people making their career there. Perhaps someone they know has worked there. Perhaps their kids might work there.
- They know their own retirement stocks are traded there, which means they are personally affected when the stock market was closed for 2 days.
So it is an event that can cut through all the science and be something they notice and feel a personal connection to.
The DefCon idea is for each person/family to make their own list of things they care about, depend on or want to do someday. And then decide what steps they will take when those things are disturbed for the first time.
The Flooding of New York City by Sandy was a single event. It will be a good long time before New York City is shutdown. But it can function as trigger point, where people realize once it has happened, it can happen again. Where they should consider what adjustments they should make now that it has been proven that the weather/climate can interrupt/shutdown their stock market investments. Perhaps they should be learning how to diversify their future into other things besides having a retirement fund.
Instead of depending on investments to provide one with enough income to buy what ever one wants/needs. Perhaps one should also be learning how to obtain what one wants/needs without investment funds. Like learning how to grow something themselves.
The events are going to happen. The common man is going to notice them. But if they do not have a system in place before the event happens, that says I will take X action when Y event happens, then they will not capitalize on the event. They will let it come and go without making any changes, because who knows if this was a significant enough event to warrant a change. Who knows if this is the ‘tipping point’. Maybe they should wait and see if something gets worse first.
There is always this tendency to think, that was bad, but it is over, and now we are past it. Things will get back to normal now. Everyone is focusing on getting back to normal. I should just focus on getting back to normal too. So they let the event pass without changing.
Some people have “change thresholds” built in better than others. Some people know that when certain things happen or fail to happen, then it is time for them to change jobs. People have thresholds set for their relationships. If someone cheats, the relationship does not normally continue as-is. And they know those things in advance. Thus it is taking that same kind of thinking and applying it to a personal response to climate change.
People devise their own lists of thresholds, of things they care about and matter to them. If they have a framework to write out what they would change/start doing differently when that threshold is first crossed, then all they have to do is follow their own plan. They won't panic and do too much too soon. But neither will they not do anything until it is too late.
Mostly it can give the individual some re-assurance that they took the appropriate actions at the appropriate times. So that afterwards they will not look back and wish they had done something different at a certain point.
And, oh, by the way, whatever list you come up with, you are already in DefCon 4. So if you are not doing your DefCon 4 actions/responses, you are behind. You are doubly behind if you don’t even know what your DefCon 4 actions/responses are yet.
