You feel invincible 'til it happens to you

 You feel invincible 'til it happens to you: why people deny climate change, dismiss hurricane forecasts, and generally do dumb things

"I am invincible!" The famous last words of Boris Grishenko.

'Til it happens to you, you don't know
How it feels
How it feels
'Til it happens to you, you won't know
It won't be real
No it won't be real
Won't know how it feels

                - Lady Gaga, "Til It Happens to You"

That chorus is about rape and sexual assault, and how people dismiss the problem until it becomes personal for them, but it applies just as much to so many other facets of our lives and those around them. To invert Upton Sinclair's quote about how difficult it is to get people to care if their paychecks depend on them looking the other way, the easiest way to get somebody to care is to have it directly impact their livelihoods. Victims of crime tend to demand a tougher stance on crime. People who are facing a life-threatening illness, or know somebody who is, support campaigns to raise awareness of that illness, from the March of Dimes (polio) to ACT UP (HIV/AIDS) to the Komen Foundation (breast cancer). A hundred years ago, people clamored for food and workplace safety regulations not out of concern for the plight of the working poor, but because Sinclair's novel The Jungle raised the disquieting possibility that, thanks to workers falling into the meat grinders, they might technically be engaging in, uh, "humanitarianism" whenever they cooked stew for dinner.

The trajectory of concern over climate change in the last twenty years has more or less followed this trend. In the 2000s, its effects were still seen as hypothetical and off in the future, and while the documentary An Inconvenient Truth raised awareness, it also invited mockery and memes from everyone from the South Park guys (ManBearPig!) to cable news pundits. When people's only experience with climate change was some slightly hotter summers than normal, or a slightly longer hurricane season, they couldn't bring themselves to care about mass extinctions or cleaving ice shelves. It was for the same reason why people so often respond to hurricane forecasts not with precautions and evacuations, but with hurricane parties. It's why, across much of the coastal South, an urban legend about a hurricane party during Camille in 1969 that allegedly ended with twenty-three people getting washed away is as much a part of local folklore as the story about the guy with the hook hand in the backseat of your car, a cautionary tale meant to scare 'em straight. As the 2010s wore on, however, and it became clear that such things as the 2004 Atlantic hurricane season were going from record-breaking outliers to the new normal, people, especially younger generations for whom this future wasn't just something their children would have to deal with, perked up at the warnings of scientists. Today, even most anti-environmentalist politicians, especially outside the US, at least pay lip service to climate change as a serious issue.

That said, there is no equivalent of that apocryphal story about the Camille hurricane party for climate change. No grand "object example" that serves as a warning. If that hurricane party story is the equivalent of an '80s slasher movie in which a guy in a hockey mask hacks up horny teenagers because they remind him of the horny camp counselors who were too busy having sex to care about him drowning all those years ago, then climate change is a nastier little fellow. It's the equivalent of one of those modern, slow-burn, arthouse-style horror movies like It Follows, The Babadook, or Hereditary where the monster is metaphorical and lurks offscreen for much of the film, and until the end you can't even be sure if the monster is real or if the protagonist is slowly losing his or her mind. In these movies, the token skeptics, the deluded fools who don't see what's coming until it happens to them, seem to actually have a point at first: is it anthropogenic climate change a monster, or is it natural cycles a mundane, if serious, psychological issue that the protagonist needs treatment for? We, the viewer, have the benefit of science the omniscience of the fourth wall (and the trailer, and genre expectations) to know that something's up that can't be explained by natural causes, but do the characters?

The monster, of course, eventually reveals itself, and here, the horror genre again provides a key to our understanding. In horror movies, even the ones that give the skeptics the benefit of the doubt at first, the skeptics are rarely sympathetic characters. Eventually, they just cause nothing but problems, sabotaging the heroes' attempts to save themselves by doubling down on ineffective solutions that might have worked under normal circumstances, but fall apart in the face of a menace where the old rules no longer apply. Oftentimes, they have ulterior motives, like Mayor Vaughn in Jaws, who was more afraid for lost tourist dollars on his beaches than lost lives and continues to dig in his heels as people die, or Carter Burke in Aliens, who actively sabotaged the Marines' mission in order to bring back an alien sample for his bosses. And when the monster comes for them, it is often brutal and set up in such a way as to deeply satisfy the audience. 

Right now, when it comes to that real-life, globetrotting horror/disaster movie called Climate Change, we're in the second act. The monster has shown its face to many of us by setting the tanned Californian and Australian backpackers on fire, freezing the cocky Texans, and drowning the kooky Floridian rednecks, but Mayor Vaughn still thinks he can beat this with a little elbow grease, homespun wisdom, and turns of phrase to make people stick their heads in the sand. His job depends on him not caring, and he's more than willing to pin the blame on all the naysayers, claiming that they're all lying and working for his enemies and spinning a massive conspiracy theory about shadowy cabals eager to prove him wrong, projecting his own motives onto others. Since he has a world-class megaphone, he's in a position to convince ordinary folks around him that there's nothing to see here, only a conspiracy against not just him, but them personally. They listen, they're convinced that the people talking about the monster are an insult to their way of life, and they double down on the very activities that strengthen the monster in the first place.

We can only hope it plays out better than Pandemic, that hacky piece of garbage that came out last year. Can you believe, people still insisting that the monster isn't real even as it's tearing their lungs out? Who wrote that crap? I bet it's a Chinese co-production.