MSNBC Poll: Do you see climate change as a threat to your life or well-being?

[haele]

26. Hasn't really hit "most people" yet. In about 3 years, you might start getting a different answer.

See, right now, except for a few things, supermarket prices haven't skyrocketed too noticeably. It's still spring, so the Northern Latitude growing and harvest season is still a couple months out.
You can still buy dairy, and microwave dinners, and soft-drinks that were bottled last year. People still go about their daily business - except for the few "inconvenient" or unseasonable storms, floods, or wild-fires that severely damage "somewhere else", and only those crazy Californios (or other Left Coasters) are looking at a summer of drought-driven water restrictions.

Your average American won't start feeling a pinch for another month or two. And that pinch can easily be shrugged off as another anomaly that lefty tree-huggers and ivory tower scientists who know nothing about the "real American World" are being cravenly alarmist about.
And next year, as the pinch becomes a slap, with few fresh produce, subsidized dairy at $8.00 a gallon, bottled water, sodas, and utility water/sewer costs quadruple because there's very little water left that's drinkable, when stores start selling more and more processed food that had been made for military shelf-life requirements that people might become uneasy.

Then the year after, when that slap has become a punch to the solar plexus...When more people - especially the elderly and children - start coming down with serious pest-borne diseases or die of heat stroke or hypothermia. When parks and recreational facilities are closed because there's no water. When less land is arable, and people's yards - not just grass, but established trees, hedges, and other vegetation, start dying off no matter what they do. When food prices don't go down after seasonal spikes, and processed food stores dwindle, further reducing the amount of available food that no one but the wealthy can afford in any large quantity. When average people in America actually start starving to death or dying of thirst. When governments have to start rationing food to stave off profiteering, riots and civil unrest.

It won't be until it becomes obvious that we're being pummeled by climate change and we aren't going to be able to go on with business as usual - that it's now too late and the tsunami waves are already climbing above our knees (or wheel-walls) and we are all going to either die or become seriously impacted for the next couple hundred years that this comfortable majority will think "well, maybe we should have done something..." and start looking for someone to blame.

Haele