Catastrophic, But Not Serious

Quoting a piece in the New Yorker:  "Most Americans are still untroubled by climate change. When the philosopher Slavoj Žižek tried to describe our current condition in a talk, in 2011, he offered an apocryphal battlefield anecdote. One soldier says to another, “Here, the situation is catastrophic, but not serious.” Žižek added, “Is this not more and more the way many of us, at least in the developed world, relate to our global predicament? We all know about the impending catastrophe—ecological, social—but we somehow cannot take it seriously." / Catastrophic but not serious: this is where we are ..." 

http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/scenes-from-a-melting-planet-on-the-climate-change-novel