Or that things will be fine and the consequences are overhyped. And yeah some of them can be overhyped like sea level rise but overall it's still gonna be pretty dire if we do nothing.
To be fair, there's no reason to assume we will be fine either. Our timeline is pretty short and humanity has hardly ever had to face a climate event on the scale that people expect will happen: some kind of massive ice-age event and/or rising seas taking out coastal land, where a majority of humans live. Not to mention there's billions more people on earth than there were for any similar previous events (they weren't similar, we didn't have cars).
Healthy skepticism is great, but personally I'd rather not our entire species die off because a majority of people assume we will be fine!
In a dynamic system anyone who says they know the consequences with a high degree of certitude is blowing smoke.
Oddly the most reasonable course of action is to always paint the worst possible future but it will presumably spur people to greater action. If it turns out to be incorrect there's no harm is there? It's not like we can overreact to climate change.
The issue is that the earth is being brought out of balance within a few decades. This has rarely happened, and when it did happen (meteorites, volcanos etc) the consequences were bad. And yet we are arrogant enough to think we can pump billions of tons in the atmosphere without consequences.
Our ancestors did enough to balance out a natural decrease in temperature that should have happened. And that was without a global industrial system. So of course what we do will massively influence the system. Going “I don’t believe things will be bad” is basically the same as “I don’t believe in climate change”. Both are an excuse not to do anything.
It's worse than that. If you say something bad will happen unless we do something about it, and then we do something about it and it doesn't happen, then years later when you say something else bad will happen unless we do something about that...people will say the earlier bad thing didn't happen so why should we believe you this time?
For example, in the 50s and 60s we had rapidly rising levels of smog and other particulate matter pollution in the US, and scientists warned that bad things would happen if we didn't get this under control.
We did get it under control, and indeed massively reduced it, and the bad things did not come to pass.
And now, bringing up those predictions from back then and saying that since they did not come to pass we shouldn't worry about current predictions on climate change or do anything about them is a staple of climate change denial arguments.
Yeah, but I think the parent posters' concern is that the outcome is "unclear", and I was just pointing out that no matter what happens, the planet will be fine, humans will survive, and our infrastructure is what'll be impacted (and consequently, our lifestyle).
None of that is "unclear", I think. It all follows from "temperatures rise" (which the parent concedes as a given). Ice melts. Waters rise. Life changes.
It's imperceptible in the same way covid was. People spend billions of dollars on mitigating it. Some people spend their life efforts on it.
The predictions would ideally fail, and that's because people take them seriously. It's fine for you to not take action, as long as someone does.
Singapore props up the land around their area to prevent rising sea levels. Not everyone can do this. Indonesia chooses to migrate their capital city away from Jakarta. It affects some professions - fossil fuels companies will have to become energy companies.
As long as the larger organizations consider it a priority, I think we'll be fine. But in many places, they do not, and that's where we have to take action. Like someone said on a meteor thread, if a meteor was going to hit Houston, most people will just ignore the warning.
I also feel this way sometimes but this article is kind of light on details and doesn't offer much proof as to why the doomsayers are wrong. Personally my biggest pet peeves about climate stuff is when they start talking about the consequences of things that are not yet projected to happen.
I read an article once about what would happen to Florida if the sea levels rose 20 feet only to find out that the projection for the next 100 years was like 1-2 feet. I feel like that happens more than it should even though ppl are all about trusting the science.
I thought this article would be about pointing these kind of rhetorical tricks out but instead it just makes a lazy comparison to other ppl who predict that bad things are going to happen.
The only sure thing is that most of these doom prediction happen to be false.
People writing this kinda things seem to think we can afford reducing the growth society. The sad reality is that if we don't all grow we will suffer way more than what climate change will bring.
Grow up, stop living like peter pan and work to find proper solution instead of complaining.
I beg to differ. Unwavering optimism that things will be fine is exactly how we got where we are today; decades of knowing global warming is on the horizon with nowhere near enough response.
No, it is not very true - even if you look at the worst case "do nothing" scenarios in the IPCC report, they are very bad, but very, very far from "we all die".
Using such hyperbole is counterproductive and makes people discount the actual risks. If we're talking about, for example, a billion people being displaced due to climate change disrupting food production or flooding areas which are currently densely populated, and many millions dying in that process, that is bad enough by itself to justify taking action, and there is no need to resort to ridiculous unjustified exaggerations implying that we're all going to die.
Recently I've been talking frequently with folks about my concerns re: climate change. The general feedback is along the lines of: "don't worry, the earth knows how to regulate itself, it will figure itself out, we'll be fine".
:(
Normally I'd agree but so far global warming has already led to worse effects than were predicted for this stage of the process. So I think there's good chance it will continue.
Also it's good to show people an idea of how it can affect them personally. By the time we're ready for this to be proven right or wrong (the article speaks of 35-60 years in the future) we're so far into the global warming process that all the worst scenarios will happen anyway. Or we did something about it and that's the reason why this didn't occur.
So I don't think it's overly alarmist. We need to act now to stop the worst.
Yeah, fair enough, those things are certainly true.
I guess what some (most?) people mean when they say "the potential consequences of climate change" are those large scale, high impact, changes that we haven't yet seen.
Which I guess could be considered a bit of moving the goal posts insofar as we've dealt with everything thrown at us thus far, as we'd otherwise not be here having this conversation.
And I do, at times, find myself thinking things like "they've been saying [whatever] is on the brink of collapse for 40 years, and it hasn't happened yet".
I would like to register a contrary prediction: I think things will be basically okay even under fairly extreme climate change.
I understand that many people may disagree with this prediction and some of those people will disagree with even communicating this prediction, as they will see it as boosterism for our decadent industrial society. However, I think if we are interested in what is true, we need to allow ourselves to conceive of such things as human civilization continuing on without much fuss.
Things are going to change a lot, yes. It might require a lot of changes to the way we live, yes. It might have some really tragic consequences, yes.
But speaking about climate change as if the apocalypse were nigh and there were nothing that could be done about it is not only counter-productive, but has played an important part in guaranteeing the situation got as bad as it has (remember Al Gore saying that, by 2014, there would be no ice at the poles? Do you think people who heard that are more or less likely to pay attention to climate change, now that 2014 has come and gone and the ice caps are still there, even if smaller?)
ah I think even that is a bit pessimistic. I'm optimistic that we can figure out carbon sequestration and transition to renewables in the next few decades and prevent any catastrophic sea level rise. I fully admit that the global North will not give a shit if some peripheral nations are destroyed by climate change, but I think this summer is starting to show people living in Vegas and Phoenix that their days there are numbered if we don't do something. Maybe I'm being optimistic though.
No, probably not. But then what's the alternative? The prediction is/was accurate, the error is in the kind of apocalyptic outcome it brings to mind. Reality is almost always far more boring. Silence doesn't seem helpful either, nor does being more vague about consequences.
Sea level rise looks more like king tides periodically destroying coastal occupations until it's uninsurable and everyone moves away. Poisioned aquifers resulting in no viable drinking water source and again, everyone leaves. Coastal erosion intensified means small islands with rich histories become nothing more than a sandbar over the course of decades, and sustains no population as it did before.
Chaotic weather looks like wildfires, tornados, and droughts 10, 20, 50% more frequent in their occurrence. But not a new phenomenon. Shit years for various crops become more common than good years because you're not getting enough sun, false springs and shock frosts destroy fruitings, yields are lower across the board. Prices go up. Buying tomatos peak season costs as much as is once did off-season.
Probably the biggest driver of inaction here is that what comes to mind is sudden shocks, yet the truth is more like a slow strangle. The urgency is just as valid if you take the long view, but it's easier to stick with the status quo when it's just the gradual discomfort of a belt tightening and not a gun pointed at your head. Boiled frogs and all that.
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