My long running pet-narrative is that we live in a time where an obvious (to us) wave of cataclysmic trouble approaches society at the same time that a miraculous age of amazing technology is also on the horizon (I know most here hold no faith in that latter part). For me, it’s always been a question of which wave will be stronger and push back the other wave – for example, can we squeeze out enough significant breakthroughs and projects to get civilization to around 2050, at which time we could conceivably possess technology that would be nothing less than wand waving-miraculous. Skeptical as collapsers are about this argument, I’m happy to go round and round about the details, because I’ve yet to be convinced that it’s a wholly impossible prospect – that tech can essentially save us (many here quote the Club of Rome report, which states that tech and a technological society only leads to more instability and is ultimately part of the problem; I don’t think those researchers were thinking big enough about what powers might be at our finger tips soon). All that said, I do recognize that our path to survival is increasingly narrow.

The second part of my world view (often shared here) is that the psychological and economic feedback loops of a pre-collapse world could have (generally undiscussed) massive impacts.  I feel like I’m seeing the first indications of this mentality everywhere, from suicide rates, geopolitical military moves and many anecdotal accounts of people I encounter feeling like we’re screwed in a broad, general way.  My point in this second aspect is always, that once big sections of society genuinely give up on an optimistic future, that very mentality will sink things in a very rapacious feedback loop.  In a similar way, once people who control all the money no longer feel optimistic about a stable western society, they will not invest in the long term projects that are the lifeblood of that society, and thus another powerful loop.   I think the rise of Trump actually reflects this pessimism as well. 

My point/question in all of this is could this be the summer in which these aforementioned loops really kick off – the summer wherein we lose the economic and psychological faith in a safe, stable world? It seems most every summer brings a little apocalyptic angst: militaries and terrorist organizations make moves in the warmer months, and weather is generally wilder. But this summer.
With a long series of severely record breaking heat each month, what is the likelihood of even far more excessive weather events over the next few months that push the public’s emotional reserves over the edge and make us feel that to keep going in this inevitable direction is unsustainable even for another decade? What is the point at which such feelings kick in for the masses? I mean, Katrina impacted us in that direction, and certain massive wildfires force us to think about how the world is literally burning up. But could this summer see the long predicted series of mega-storms causing exceedingly expensive damage to several cities in the US (and elsewhere) at the same time that we deal with record breaking fires that cause evacuations, at the same time that we see hot summer nights fueling wild, riotous political conventions and.. what else.. we have to assume at least some other natural disasters or terrorism in that time frame as matches the pattern. Plus the ongoing collapse of Venezuela the likely fiasco that will be the summer Olympics in Brazil. Could this broad lack of faith in stability bring things down much more quickly?

Tl;dr Do you think this summer, with its record breaking set up, will kick off the kind of environmental damage that will cause people and governments to lose hope and thus start behaving differently?