People not acting until they're forced to.
And now for something incredibly boring and mundane.
For my Uni course I've had to read about the history of London, particularly the 1800s where they had no sewers, everybody flushed their crap into the Thames river, which infected the water table that people were also drinking from, and dying of cholera.
The government didn't do shit about it (literally, hehe) until the Great Stink event during the unusually hot summer of 1858, where the smell of the sewage coming from the river got so terribly bad that the MPs couldn't use their shiny new parliament building.
Only then did the majority of the government decide to act, and started building the sewer system which is still in use today, and water treatment works for people to have clean drinking water. Since people still didn't understand the link between sewage and disease at that time, it was still disputed within parliament as being a waste of money.
This got me thinking about how this (and many other historical situations) parallels with the current problems that we face with climate change. Despite how the most sensible of us are saying we should take steps now to combat the effects of climate change, most people can't be bothered, don't believe it's happening, or value material wealth over our future well-being. Money is apparently more important than lives anyway, right?
Perhaps it's pointless to tell people to change, because there's absolutely no way that we will - Not until we're forced to by the effects of climate change and are suffering as a result. We'll still continue to live the way we are now until it's impossible to do so, and perhaps that's always the way we as a species have done things.
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TL;DNR:
Most human behaviour in history states that we don't do a damned thing about a dire situation until it really becomes dire enough to force us to act, and I've linked that with our inaction on the current problems we face with climate change.