"Why weren't we told? Why didn't anyone stop this?"

It will happen when coastal cities go under.

And coastal cities - most of them are large and important, seeing shipping by sea and coastal ports are very much a part of their growth in human history.

Now NY city - how many feet of sea level rise will it take to submerge every street and building?

About climate change.

They do not want to spend any money on it.
Even though their business practices have caused the damage.

Too expensive.

Just let the regular person suffer the consequences and let them pay for it.

to wear a piece of cloth across their face. I even saw comments here on DU about people not wanting to live in "a faceless society."

So it's no wonder that we can't make even the most minimal changes in our behavior to prevent a global catastrophe.

There was gas rationing during WWII. Imagine the outcry if we tried that today.

every new coffee shop is lit up like a lighting showroom. Our neighborhoods are being lit up like movie sets or prison yards. Its an immense cultural doubling down on waste, the equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ears and going lalalal i cant hear you.

goes into melting icecaps, and, because of the latent heat of fusion of water, the ice caps are an incredible energy sink. Even with ice shelf destabilization, by the time enough energy has been released to raise sea level by a few meters so much energy will have been absorbed into the atmosphere and oceans that serial cereal harvest failures are almost assured. Three or four grain harvest failures in a decade in Argentina, the US and Canada, Ukraine, India, and/or China will cause horrible destabilization and likely kill billions. Scientists are working on heat tolerant RuBisCo activase but this should be funded on a Manhattan Project scale.