As China’s Q1 GDP growth slowed to a six-year low of 7 percent, there have been murmurs of unease. The reserve-requirement ratio was lowered one percentage point on April 19, and there is anticipation of further interest rate cuts.

Meanwhile, in recent years some people no longer view growth and affluence as wholly positive, separate from the costs they entail.

It is much simpler — in the decade of economic boosterism — to conceive our woes and weal only in economic terms.

Economists are fond of talking about tradeoffs. These tradeoffs enable a high-flying passenger to erase their carbon footprint while booking an airline ticket, or a consumer to declare themselves “green” while pushing an overloaded shopping cart at a mall.

In some countries climate change has become a very divisive issue.

Around the globe, the public is concerned about climate change, believes that climate change is real, but is reluctant to make much sacrifice itself.

We are asking one generation to make sacrifices for future generations, and this sounds jarring at an era when all that truly matters is gratification today.

But economists can be pathologically optimistic. This optimism is pragmatic, making it possible for a general feeling of complacency. Growth is good. Trade is mutually beneficial. Technology is divine. Actually, solving the problem can be messier, for initiating any change is certain to meet with fierce resistance.

As Niccolo Machiavelli put it succinctly in “The Prince,” “There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.”

The reason?

“Because the innovation has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new,” he explained.

According to “Climate Shock: the Economic Consequences of a Hotter Planet” by Gernot Wagner and Martin L Weitzman, “In many ways, putting a proper price on carbon isn’t a question of if, it’s a question of when.”

We are generally believers in science, but on this issue there are doubters, those skeptical of the assertions that climate change will lead to extreme temperatures, floods and droughts.

Arctic sea ice has lost half of it area and three quarters of its volume in just the past 30 years.

Ice caps are melting, but some experts try to explain away these changes in terms of longer cycles.

Zheng Guoguang, Chief of China Meteorological Administration, observed recently that there have been noticeable changes in China’s climate since the middle of the last century. There has been on average an increase of 0.23 degrees centigrade for every 10 years — about twice the average global rate of change.

In an article in the People’s Daily on November 24 last year, Zheng pointed out that global warming is a serious threat to China’s ecosystems and socio-economic development.

Plenty of evidence

One study by the UK’s National Weather Service found with 90 percent confidence that “human influence has at least doubled the risk of a heatwave exceeding [a] threshold magnitude” of a mean summer temperature recorded in Europe in 2003, and in no other year since 1851.

It is predicted that by the end of the century we can expect today’s 100-year floods to hit as frequently as every three to 20 years.

That’s still a almost a century away, well after our earthly tenure, so who cares? After me the deluge.

You love your children, but that love, in strictly scientific terms, is probably not infinite, and in realistic term, how does that compare to what you enjoy today?

The worst effects of climate change are still remote, while the sacrifices can be real if it means action now — although even acting now would be too late.

According to “Climate Shock,” “Even if we stopped emitting carbon tomorrow, we would have decades of warming and centuries of sea-level rise locked in.”

A lack of any effective action would mean our children will be largely powerless against their fate.

Given our reluctance to make sacrifices, people prefer to take solace in technical fixes. Wagner and Weitzman find appealing the proposal for shooting small reflective particles into the stratosphere in an attempt to cool the planet.

Climate change is unlike any other environmental problem we have met before, uniquely irreversible, thus dictating a high seriousness.

Blame game

And so overwhelming is the resistance that, short of a major jolt of the global, collective conscience, it may well prove impossible to tackle the problem just by reducing emissions to ward off the inevitable.

We have seen how global warming can lead to bickering in domestic politics.

As the book observes, “It’s a whole lot tougher to get voters to enact pollution limits on themselves if the costs are felt domestically but the benefits are global: a planetary ‘free-rider’ problem.”

Anyhow, it is hard for sacrifice to be conceived of self-serving market principles.

It is more tempting to turn it into an international blame game.

In time, skepticism creeps in.

“Whenever science points to the very real potential of these types of catastrophic outcomes, cognitive dissonance kicks in,” the authors write.

This is a far cry from the kind of action expected in an climate emergency like this. As the book observes, “Society can most directly control the inflow of emissions, and even turning that inflow to zero immediately wouldn’t solve the problem. It will take centuries and millennia for the excess carbon to flow out naturally. ‘Wait and see’ might as well be called ‘give up and fold.’”

The nature of the problem means that urgency is lost on policy makers and the general public alike.

For a species of insects, it is very natural for individuals to sacrifice their lives for the survival of the species. But the human species has evolved to a stage where it is difficult to make tradeoffs, even though we are not asking for the sacrifice of lives, but just to waive a little bit of creature comforts.

Thus, to flatter our collective sense of well-being, it is necessary to continue to be willfully blind to the problem, and get bogged down in the technicalities.

We insure our life against an uncertain future but, sadly, we no longer care much about this life-sustaining planet, a planet which is not just ours.