Opinion We are in the middle of a climate apocalypse. But do we really care?

And yet, life continued. Offices remained open, cars clogged highways, street vendors coughed into their palms and adjusted their masks. We adapted, as we always do.

In Los Angeles, the world burns in a different way. The hillsides, dry from relentless droughts, ignite with terrifying ease. The fires creep closer each year, smoke blotting out the sun, turning the sky a sickly orange. People evacuate, but many stay, accustomed now to the seasonal infernos. They wear masks, not just for a pandemic but to filter the ash from the air. The news cycles through footage of mansions ablaze, of highways lined with red embers, but soon moves on. The city rebuilds. Insurance claims are filed. A new fire season begins.

In Beijing, smog turns skyscrapers into ghosts, swallowing entire skylines. In Delhi, the AQI soars past 400 regularly — numbers that should trigger panic, but do not. We check AQI levels like we check the weather, adjust our routines but not our systems.

Tech entrepreneur Bryan Johnson arrives in India, his eyes burning, his skin breaking into hives, unable to reconcile his body’s visceral reaction with the casual way others move through it. He sees people jogging in the smog, lungs pulling in air that corrodes from the inside. The problem is not just pollution; it is that we have learned to live with it. We have built an entire economy around mitigating the symptoms instead of solving the disease.

Air purifiers hum in homes and offices. Masks are now fashion accessories. Insurance companies have policies for climate-induced disasters. Governments issue warnings but rarely act. The United States, once a source of critical public health data, has shut down its air quality monitoring programme at embassies abroad, cutting off vital information in cities where pollution data was often scarce or unreliable. The smog remains, but we will know less about it.

Meanwhile, large parts of the world breathe poisoned air without even knowing how bad it is. Cambodia has no official government air quality tracking. Many regions in Africa and West Asia remain unmonitored. In contrast, North America, with its robust infrastructure, accounts for 56 per cent of all ground-based air quality stations.

The consequences are real. Air pollution is not an abstract threat — it is already shaving years off our lives. In 2021 alone, it accounted for 8.1 million deaths globally. Children under five are especially vulnerable, their lungs developing in air thick with toxins. We check AQI levels before stepping outside, invest in noise-canceling headphones to drown out protests we do not join. We work. We consume. We move on.

We used to mark time by the seasons. Now, we mark it by disasters. The summer the fires reached the city limits. The winter when the power grids failed. The monsoon that drowned the subways. The sky turns orange, and we take photos of it. We caption it: Eerie but beautiful. We order groceries, the courier arriving in the haze, their mask the only barrier between lungs and poison. We rate the delivery five stars.

The comparison to America’s obesity crisis, as Johnson notes, is apt. A slow-moving catastrophe, one so omnipresent that it fades into the background. It is easier to live with than to fight. It becomes woven into daily life, an accepted inconvenience, a fact rather than a crisis. It is easier to build a billion-dollar industry around mitigating harm — air purifiers, health apps, weighted blankets — than to address the root cause. It is easier to treat the symptoms than the disease.

But what happens when adaptation is no longer possible? When the air is not just bad but unbreathable? When the water is not just rising but drowning cities? When heat is not just uncomfortable but unsurvivable? The problem with the soft apocalypse is that it is still an apocalypse. It still ends in collapse. We tell ourselves we have time, that the worst is always just ahead, that we will act when we must. But by the time catastrophe demands full recognition, it is often too late.

Or, maybe one day, we wake up, check the AQI, check the markets, check the notifications, and realise we have adapted to the point of extinction.

The writer is a consultant at AON.