Someone said that it's because we humans are very good at reacting at immediate danger and very bad at reacting at risks building up slowly.
I don't know if it is true, but by today still voting for parties denying climate change all the way and that have done nothing in past years to prevent this type of risks is crazy.
I have a tiny lithium battery on a desk in my lab that started swelling about a week ago. I've been meaning to go to the recycle place every day since then to drop it off, but nothing exploded yet, so here I sit with a slightly swollen battery some meters away from me.
I'd say you're just about right :)
The other thing to do is discharge it, so it has little energy stored to maintain/enlarge a fire
A drone engineer I worked with would immediately put any suspect battery into a barrel of water for several days, then get them disposed of properly.
The risk really seems trivial, probably because of our extensive experience with ordinary alkaline and NiCad batteries with a very benign degradation pattern, but the risk with Li-Ion is no joke.
All your fire extinguishers will do you no good if it goes off while you are out of the house. Also, the fire extinguishers will only suppress the surrounding fire, and do nothing about the core Li-Ion fire itself.
Very applicable example for the thread!
So like many other boogeymen, driving to work is still far more dangerous. Back of the napkin shows about 100x more likely to die in a car crash than experience a battery incident in any given year.
This month a 'hunger stone' appeared in the Danube, indicating the levels for pre-20th century famine.
And various other markers in many countries for 'the water reached this level', ironically, on the side of existing buildings.
Yet we build closer and closer to rivers because (flash) flood events happen rarely, and typically not in our lifetime.
That's changing. Even though I'm 64, I suspect that I'll be seeing a lot of "not in my lifetime" stuff happening, before I pop my clogs.
Last major volcanic eruption around lots of humans: Krakatoa - 1883 Last major M9 earthquake before Sumatra: Chile - 1960
and so on. Things seem a bit more 'major' now because there's 7bn+ people.
As a friend says, "Our collective cognitive dissonance is something I would not want to climb with a bike."
We failed.
Cutting down on annual emissions will not be accompanied by reduction in atmospheric CO2, unless the current rate of emission is lower than that of natural processes that take CO2 out of the atmosphere.
That's why atmospheric CO2 continues to rise, despite cuts, if the cuts at global scale are at all real.
Enough cheap energy (that doesn't produce CO2) and some incentive and you could have CO2 slowly removed.
Like in Critical Mass by Daniel Suarez.
Of course the free energy would instantly allow us to eliminate a huge amount of emissions but that's not really relevant to the point. All the concrete for the tens of thousands of facilities would add up a good amount of additional CO2 to scrub as well.
Humans are really good at stealing, lying, beating their wives and all sorts of other bad shit too but you don't see people going around saying "aw shucks, it's just nature, whatcha gonna do". One of the benefits of society is to tame human nature in such a way that we all benefit more than we lose and those benefits let us outcompete the adjacent society whether that's the cavemen or a nation state.
Whichever society figures out how to marginalize the voice of the unprincipled, the emotional, those who lie with plausible deniability for their own (often not even financial, just in their own damn head) self interest and overall detriment will mop the floor with the rest of them.