The Collapse of Western Civilization

A map of Bangladesh from 2300 comparing current sea levels with 2000 shows the country mostly underwater.

Scientists speaking out about the climate crisis were accused of attention-seeking. Such scientists were denounced and threatened, and some were legally prosecuted and had their work subpoenaed. Some countries—namely the US—passed laws that limited what scientists could research. In 2025, the US passed the National Stability Protection Act, under which hundreds of scientists were imprisoned for reducing public safety by emphasizing the climate crisis and potentially preventing economic development. While climate science did receive funding, it was at the expense of other branches of science and of the arts; the historian speculates that the arts were underfunded because artists grasped the consequences of the zeitgeist. The artists and scientists were proven correct, and, in 2010, it was recognized that scientists had underestimated the implications of climate change.

The historian attributes “human adaptive optimism”—or the perception of illimitable human adaptation—as a primary cause for humans’ failure to take climate action seriously, while scientists’ failure to recognize the severity of climate change is attributed to then-common discipline specialization and reductionist methods.