In some ways I wonder if these timescales are "beyond comprehension" for most people. You can tell people the temperature will go up in 20 years, but you can't make them feel what it will be like. In the same way you can tell a 10 year old what it's like to be age 35 but they don't get it, and I've heard what it's like to be age 80 but I don't really know and won't for some time.

> You can tell people the temperature will go up in 20 years

I think the biggest issue with the climate change communication is that the scientists decided to focus on a temperature delta.

There is no meaningful temperature delta, it's just something that you get after a lot of aggregation and averaging.

Sure it makes sense for scientists running their models and such, but it should never have been the primary communication tool to politicians and laymen.

I think it would have been significantly better if they invented some new scale, like the Richter scale or the hurricane severity scale, which instead incorporates the effects of the average temperature rising. A scale which directly communicates a sense of how many more fires will we see per year, how many more severe storms, flash floods etc.

I think we've gotten to the point where the question can be asked looking back, not forward: think back to your childhood and how much things have changed since then? If you've lived long enough you can notice these things.

I used to have snow for weeks each winter in my city and now if I get 2-3 days of snow a year it's unusual. Extreme weather events where it rains in one day as much as in one month have become a recurring event to the point we're re-planning sewage systems around these things.

Arguably it's rational (though selfish) to think like this.

Life is short, there's no point freezing and living off leaves for the next few decades when you'll be old in the blink of an eye anyway