[shrubby]

This scary, yet almost nothing on the news.

We're living in a fake world and pretending everything is fine.

Adam Curtis made a movie HyperNormalisation and we're living it also today.

Adam Curtis:

“HyperNormalisation” is a word that was coined by a brilliant Russian historian who was writing about what it was like to live in the last years of the Soviet Union. What he said, which I thought was absolutely fascinating, was that in the 80s everyone from the top to the bottom of Soviet society knew that it wasn’t working, knew that it was corrupt, knew that the bosses were looting the system, know that the politicians had no alternative vision. And they knew that the bosses knew that they knew that. Everyone knew it was fake, but because no one had any alternative vision for a different kind of society, they just accepted this sense of total fakeness as normal. And this historian, Alexei Yurchak, coined the phrase “HyperNormalisation” to describe that feeling.

[fallinditch]

Well worth watching, Adam Curtis takes you on a wild ride around recent history and strings together an amazing viewpoint - intentionally fucking with how you emotionally understand the present, by showing how power, myth, and simplification interact over time.

Full film at https://youtu.be/to72IJzQT5k

[coldtea]

The top politicians, academics, businessmen, can party with underage children and even torture them, or dicuss blatant undemocratic actions that impact billions, and it's business as usual.

You think they'd care for something as remote as the AMOC collapse?

[helloplanets]

Isn't this exactly the point the original post is making?

[sph]

Another take away from that documentary is not that politicians do not care, but that the world has become so increasingly complex, fast-moving and interconnected there is no simple or real solution to any of the problems people have. They just do not have the answers.

Whenever a politician gets elected on the wish to fix housing, jobs, the pension system, the larger and larger divide between the ultra rich and the masses, either they are lying to you or are hopelessly naive they can achieve anything in their 4 years. At that point all they can do is just fill their pockets like everybody else is doing.

[netsharc]

Politicians seem to end up reacting to the polling/what the reactionary voters want, because they don't want to be kicked out of office. I don't know if it's just ego, or if it's a nobility of "We need to win, because if the other side wins, they'll destroy this country!"... this leftist still believes Obama and Biden wanted to keep/build a decent society, so do people like Bernie and AOC (let's not talk about Pelosi and her stock portfolio though), and that Trump is just about naked corruption with some populist policies thrown to the rabid supporters like meat...

[tim333]

>almost nothing on the news

Maybe not that exact variant but there have been thousand of hours of climate change stuff in the news, including worrying about changing ocean currents.

[roenxi]

It isn't actually all that scary; humans cope pretty well over a wide variety of temperatures. If the change caught everyone by surprise it'd be a huge problem but it seems to be fairly well understood and there is lots of time to adjust.

Worst case scenario seems to be that people will stop migrating to Europe.

[lossolo]

Europe is one of the world's largest agricultural producers and exporters. France alone is one of the top grain exporters globally. The EU exports massive quantities of wheat, barley, dairy, and processed food to North Africa, the Middle East, and Sub-Saharan Africa. Countries like Egypt, Algeria, and Nigeria are heavily dependent on European grain imports. An AMOC collapse would devastate growing seasons, slash yields, and potentially make large parts of Northern Europe unsuitable for current agriculture.

And it's not just food. Europe is a major producer and exporter of fertilizers. If European industrial and agricultural output collapses, the ripple effects hit global food supply chains hard. Countries that depend on those imports will face famine.

Then there's the knock-on, hundreds of millions of people in food-insecure regions losing a key supply source, simultaneous disruption to Atlantic weather patterns affecting rainfall in West Africa and the Amazon, potential shifts in monsoon systems affecting South and East Asia. It's a cascading global food security crisis.

> lots of time to adjust

This assumes a gradual slowdown, but paleoclimate evidence suggests AMOC transitions can happen within a decade or even less. The idea that we'd just smoothly adapt to one of the most dramatic climate shifts in human civilization is not supported by what we know about how these systems behave.

[SupremumLimit]

The ignorance of this comment is breathtaking. How are the crops going to grow if the temperature drops by 15 degrees Celsius? What marine and terrestrial ecosystems can survive a sudden catastrophic change like that? What’s going to happen to the weather patterns after this planet-scale shift? How do you “adjust” to the collapse of your food supply and entire ecosystems?

[__d]

Yes. And totally no.

Some humans will very likely survive. Millions, possibly hundreds of millions, will die.

Life as it has been known for hundreds of years will change dramatically.

An unwillingness or inability to conceive of this possible future as anything more than “it’ll be colder, but fine” would make it vastly worse for many people.

[PinkMilkshake]

> humans cope pretty well over a wide variety of temperatures.

That's not the problem, though. The problem is almost nothing else can. Livestock, staple crops, pollinating insects, etc.