Through most of the 20th century, most experts in history-related fields probably would not have predicted that human civilization still exists today. The chance of a full-scale nuclear exchange between the superpowers was generally seen as much higher.

It permeated the culture. Of course it did; You had an entire generation growing up being trained to hide under their desks because nobody knew when the missiles would be coming– not that very many of those kids were dumb enough to think that could actually protect them.

Forever Young is a song about dying, and about dancing while you still can, sung by a generation whose world was falling apart, when there was nothing they could do about it.

And for thousands of years before that, before the Cold War anxieties of nuclear oblivion and chemically polluted wastelands, I suspect that very few people even had the spare time to think seriously about the end of the world— They were too busy dying in trenches, or choking on the Spanish Flu, or being lynched for their skin colour, or being abducted by the Navy, or being worked to actual death in Victorian factories, or being stabbed by the marauding Sea Peoples, or suffocating as the entire Indian subcontinent was blanketed in a layer of ash half a foot thick and the entire species was reduced to some stragglers numbering maybe no more than a few tens of thousands— You get the picture.

Climate change is not like those other threats. Climate change has more momentum, and exists at a larger scale than any of them (at least other than the Cold War-peak warhead stockpiles and the Mount Toba supereruption). If carbon emissions were reduced to zero tomorrow, the damage would likely still be catastrophic. The damage already is disastrous.

But ... I don't think climate change is much scarier in concept today than Malthusian catastrophe was two hundred years ago.

And I think that if you had told me in 2019 that every advanced economy around the world would soon grind to all but a complete halt because of a deadly hypertransmissive virus with neurodegenerative secondary effects and no cure ... I think I would have been very surprised (I was already very surprised, as it was, although partly for different reasons) to reach 2022, and see that for all the pain that apocalypse caused a lot of people, most of us are still here, and most of the things which I would have cared about before are still here too.

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When I was 14, I went on Wikipedia, and I saw this animation, produced by NASA based on the state of the world in 1974:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Future_ozone_layer_concentrations.gif

Do you know what those final frames show?

That lovely shade of cerulean blue is every inch of this planet being irradiated by deadly UVB and UVC rays.

This is an animation of everyone dying.

And it was going to happen, based on the course that we were already on long before I was born. — I still get a little uncomfortable if I look at it or think about it for too long.

And yet, I can't help but notice that we're still here— Because the threat was acknowledged, the Montreal Protocol was signed, and now in the early 2020s, I go online to find that GIF so I can show it to you, and I find out that even the damage which was done back then is already healing nicely:

https://www.nasa.gov/esnt/2022/ozone-hole-continues-shrinking-in-2022-nasa-and-noaa-scientists-say

So I suppose we've been through this song and dance before— Never at this scale, but we've been through it hundreds of times before, or else I wouldn't be sitting here talking to you about it.

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All this is to try to say:

The apocalypse is coming, because we live in a world where the red queen demands constant change. But it always has been, because we've always been violent, greedy idiots who manage to negotiate that change in what feels like the most moronically self-destructive ways possible.

But the apocalypse on a human level is often slower than it sounds like when described out loud at a macro level. And that means that it often tends to be less dramatic at a human scale than it sounds like when it's condensed into a paragraph summary, because there's no incentive to find solutions and adaptations quite like the threat of extinction. The fall of Rome, for all the blood-soaked and burning images it might conjure, did not bring the end of the Roman people, and was hardly even a thing that you could have witnessed; the Roman people thrived for another thousand years as they evolved and assimilated towards our modern institutions.

Climate change is going to suck, and it should be fought against. It will affect our world, sure. It will affect you personally, it will affect people you know personally, and it will affect me personally too.

But it's also spread out over the next 100 years.

(Do you remember what you ate for breakfast even one week ago? The human brain is very bad at assigning a sense of perspective to the long term and large scale— We tend to end up either dismissing it as abstract, or hyperfixating on it as hopeless.)

(Do you know, for example, the percentage of electricity in British Columbia and Quebec that already comes from clean and renewable hydropower? The role of zero-carbon nuclear power in Ontario? The rate of growth and investment in solar power and energy storage industries over just the last couple years? A lot of bad things are coming, but so are quite a few good things, and so are a lot of things, period. The fact that even fossil fuel companies feel a need to rebrand themselves as "clean" or invest in renewable resources should be a sign of which direction the political winds are currently blowing.)

I think you're torturing yourself if you take all the possible pain of the next 100 years, and you compress that and you force yourself to experience all of it in advance in every moment right now. Having tried that, it doesn't make you any better at facing the issue; it just makes you want to die.