What if the end of the world came and nobody noticed?
It’s not quite an idle question.
You see, something remarkable happened last week. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of scientists working under the aegis of the United Nations, issued a report on our planet’s health. Turns out it’s worse than we thought. Barring prompt — and politically unlikely — measures to drastically cut carbon output within the next decade, they say we’ll begin to see worsening droughts, wildfires, coral reef decimation, coastal flooding, food shortages and poverty beginning as soon as 2040.
You can expect mass evacuations from the most heavily impacted areas. As one of the report’s authors, Aromar Revi, director of the Indian Institute for Human Settlements, told The New York Times, “In some parts of the world, national borders will become irrelevant. You can set up a wall to try to contain 10,000 and 20,000 and 1 million people, but not 10 million.”
And we haven’t even gotten to the remarkable part yet. That has to do with our collective response to this doomsday prognosis. In a word, America shrugged.
Beyond our bandwidth
That’s a necessarily subjective analysis, but I’ll stand by it. Yes, news media dutifully reported the story and pundits dutifully sounded the alarm. But none of it seemed to quite register. Two days later, the story was pretty much over, our attention having already moved on.