An issue is when there's an issue which people with information are trying to work around, word gets out & the risk becomes exaggerated to societal collapse. Nevermind that a plague could come & kill half the population & society wouldn't collapse. So when people get the idea that we're trying to stop society from collapsing, they expect we'll still see society almost collapse. But instead we're averting a much lower risk (which is still very costly) & so the final price we pay is nowhere near "if we hadn't done X, society would've collapsed"
Basically we need to moderate both opinions which effectively work together: the "there's no problem to begin with" group feels validated by the "the world is ending" group being way off the mark
This happens with global warming too. Some people think everything's going to fall apart within the next 10 years. They're wrong. So others claim there isn't a problem, because they were wrong
Science communication and trying to appropriately communicate risk has a lot of issues, yeah. I don't really blame them because there's been more than two decades of very obvious failure to get sufficient numbers of people sufficiently politically engaged to change enough to avoid catastrophic outcomes. In general, if you're a relatively high information person, you should probably be looking up the actual reports themselves by organisations like the IPCC.
As to your 1/2/3 scenarios, 1 is basically impossible at this point unless every major country starts extremely rapid decarbonisation, like zero carbon within 15 years sort of thing. We think we are on track for option 2, and with predictable mitigations (countries successfully pull off all pledged reductions) it's still pretty much 2, just potentially less severe. By "less severe", I mean we can try to prevent at least some of that sea level rise which means there will be some cities that become coastal but don't get catastrophically flooded. But like, Miami for example, that city won't exist by the end of the century without a hypothetical and unproven seawall (people always say seawalls, sure it's a decent idea, but we don't know if it's even feasible for us to build them to the necessary standards. It's like asking every coastal city to build something more complex and safety critical than Hoover Dam).
An important thing to think about is that the difference between 1 and 2 is class based. When I said 1 was impossible, I meant that it was impossible for like "most people", because we're on track for billions of people to become refugees because of climate change, likely leading to wars and significant political issues. But obviously if you're wealthy enough, you are basically insulated from those outcomes because you can just keep moving away from the coast (even if millions of other people are trying to move there at the same time) and the only real impact on you is the broader economic impacts on the country you live in, and even those are muted. So for the wealthy, it's always really been a question of "Is it going to be 1 or 3?", which is a big part of the reason why it has been so immensely hard to see significant political change to prevent anthropogenic climate change.
We don't really understand the science of 3 well enough to understand what the tipping points would be to start a runaway greenhouse effect, so no one knows for certain. We need more science on it. I think a very reasonable guess is that it won't happen until our greenhouse gas heat retention is at least as high as it was during the various times in Earth's history when the polar ice caps didn't exist, which gives us significant runway to work with. Beyond that, we just don't know.
I think there's enormous reason for concern, but... I also think there's a not-so-fine line between saying (A) that we will go through some major hardship and decreased quality of life as we attempt to mitigate and adapt, versus (B) civilization is finished, there's nothing left but despair and destruction, kids have no viable future on this planet, etc. The latter strikes me as a mass projection of millenarian eschatological thinking onto what is admittedly a troubling set of data. I suppose that policy makers find it useful, therefore, to stoke a certain amount of sky-is-falling panic, particularly among teenagers who are more inclined to be attracted to and scared of doomsday scenarios. But by the same mechanism (ie supplanting rational discourse with doomsday panic), a counter-movement scores easy points saying "look, nothing's happening." The same basic flaw on public messaging pertains to vaccines and masks. What seems to have happened is that those in charge of public messaging have concluded that the majority don't know enough or care enough about science, and so they need to tap into raw fear and emotional appeals just like the science deniers do. What this does, unfortunately, is cheapen the conversation to the point where we're measuring the stress levels of teenagers as if that were a useful metric of how severe climate change actually is or will be. Their stress levels, just like the stress levels of anti-vaxers, aren't based on rational thought; they're generated by fear-peddling from one messaging system or the other. As both these systems try to out-alarm each other, they tend to drift further toward worst-case scenarios and their exponents move closer to shouting for revolution (e.g. Jan 6th), if only to serve as post-justification for the hysteria they engender to serve their goals. Climate scientists shouldn't stoop to the level of deniers. It's too short a game to keep people in panic at all times. If we've learned anything from the failure of messaging during covid, it's that trying to sustain an endless freak-out doesn't work, and it's ultimately counterproductive, because daily life causes drift away from any singular narrative, and groups of people then grow stronger counter-narratives even more dangerous than those they had before.
I feel sorry for kids whose lives are made to feel meaningless and short-changed by this information warfare on both sides. Yes climate change is real and dangerous and yes the world needs to be proactive, and yes quality of life will decline, more in some places than others, and mostly falling on the global poor. Yes children should be educated about it and yes adults need to get ahead of it, including changing systems and practices that there is deep resistance to changing. But panicking the hell out of 14 year olds - or in this case, 50-somethings, that civilization is imminently coming to an end is going to have the terrible consequence of hastening or creating an end through instilling abject despair, rather than cultivating the means and the will to make the necessary changes.
Alarmism. Societal change is inevitable, societal collapse is not. Society has survived a hell of a lot. Chinese society survived the Mongols. European society survived losing a third of its population to the black plague. Is climate change going to wipe out a third of the world population anytime soon? I doubt it.
There are mountains of people doing what you do and complaining about alarmism and fear mongering and chiding people for apocalyptic predictions any time this subject comes up. I think that's worse than unhelpful, and is a disservice to everyone that lives after us. People are sounding the alarms and making dire predictions because there is so far 0 indication that as a global society we can cooperate well enough to prevent serious and irreparable harm to Earth's ecosystems and a great deal of consequent human suffering. We just barely, as a species, managed to contain ourselves well enough to not blow up in a nuclear light show. Peace is a fragile stalemate, not a lack of desire to destroy each other. If you ask me, there's no hope of an adequate change of inertia to prevent unprecedented human suffering stemming from AGW, and that's in large part because people would rather ignore it and stay comfortable. Toning down the alarmism does nothing to fix that.
"ecological collapse, food shortages due to crop collapse, and of course rising sea levels causing mass migration"
Those statements are so vague in measurement as to mean nothing.
I've read the IPCC report and the relevant section says nothing of generalized society ending collapses as people would seem to want you to believe.
There's a few that you can read about:
1. A collapse in permafrost may occur (low confidence);
2. collapse of Maize in some regions, may exist under 3°C or more of global warming (low confidence)
etc...
Ok, those aren't great or desired things, and we need to mitigate that, but the world isn't ending. This isn't even close to a world war, a nuclear bomb going off, a massive solar event that takes out the grid etc...
I'd love to see way less apocalyptic language used and more talk about tradeoffs and realistic possible future costs of how we produce and consume vs finding sustainable growth.
But we need to strike a balance here. I agree with the person above that putting big numbers as to exaggerate and drive panic is not really a prudent approach. At the end of the day, it hurts more than helps for a very simple reason: people remember. If you sell a doomsday scenario and nothing happens, people will start to dismiss your claims, like the boy who cried wolf. I recall 20 years ago seeing articles claiming that "Snow will be a thing of the past" or "Arctic to be ice-free by 2020". Nothing happened. Now we hear that we are facing mass extinction in a few decades. People get anxious and nervous when they see that, but then when nothing happens they will start to discount heavily your claims.
On one hand we have people denying anything is happening and on the other we have a doom cult where people people civilization is going to end because of the weather. Like people who don’t want to have children because they’re afraid of the consequences of climate change. Tell people that there’s going to be change but things are going to be mostly ok and some of them just lose their minds.
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!
I think both your examples speak to why we shouldn't be flippant about claims of climate collapse.
The Doomsday Clock is not a valid representation of scientific consensus, and is completely incomparable to the current conversation. It largely reflects the political interpretation of one non-profit. In contrast the concerns over climate change are not posted in PR briefs, but in a plethora of scientific papers, in various fields, that repeatedly show we are in or past a worse case prediction.
The ozone layer is more analogous, but the problem had the advantage of being a specific problem, with a soon found and cost efficient solution. In comparison, climate change is also 100% true, but rather than a particular aerosol that can be swapped out, it is literally the foundation of the entirety of human industrialization.
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.
People can be on the same page but still have a debate about the extent of the situation. They could agree on man made climate change while believing it's not a doomsday scenario. The extent is important because that's how you set sensible policies. If it's really not doomsday than the policies you might advocate for would be ridiculous. If it is a doomsday scenario then the lack of policies one of the skeptics you spoke with would be ridiculous.
people ... understand that there's clearly something going wrong with the world
something is terribly wrong
This feeling of impending catastrophe, especially when prompted by signals as imperceptible to a human being as average change of 1.33 degrees Celsius (on land) on the average of the 20th century temperatures, to me is an indication of that kind of paranoia or panic that feeds on tiny when not completely imaginary cues.
This is not to say that I don't believe climate change is real; just that I think that the debate would be more rational and productive if people relied on scientific data and stopped using personal feelings, anecdotes and questionable reports to support their position.
because “total collapse” is the scare tactic so it gets views. in reality this apocalyptic foreshadowing just erodes trust in climate science. the news has played chicken little with climate articles for decades. people are desensitized at best and no longer believe it at worst. climate change has a severe messaging problem
I honestly believe that this is one of the main reasons why there is so much push back on climate change. Every time scientists say something catastrophic might happen (even though it might be true), I think people look at it and think that it must not be possible. If we were a little better in choosing the words we used to convey its urgency, I think it would reach a lot more people.
The skepticism is good, but my concern is that the issue has become so politicized, and people are so emotionally invested in the outcomes, that true objectivity is nearly impossible. Mix in natural variations and the fact that the timescales are not intuitively understood by most people, and I really doubt we'll be able to save ourselves from massive global catastrophe if that's the way this ends up going.
In my mind, the real problem is that we do not account for the value of natural resources and the environment in our economics. That, combined with a rabid consumerist mentality is rapidly leading us down a rode of polluted resource-exhaustion.
I guess you're referring to media jumping too quickly to "bad science" for every single event of floods, drought, fires etc, therefore using fear and producing saturation in fellow citizens.
that said, I honestly have a bad time trying to figure out if there's such a thing as "too alarmist" re. claims like "one third of projected population by 2070 will live in a nearly unlivable earth" https://www.pnas.org/content/117/21/11350
The panic isn’t unfounded. There is work being done every day that shows we our on our way to collapse. To think otherwise is equivalent to climate denial.
Basically we need to moderate both opinions which effectively work together: the "there's no problem to begin with" group feels validated by the "the world is ending" group being way off the mark
This happens with global warming too. Some people think everything's going to fall apart within the next 10 years. They're wrong. So others claim there isn't a problem, because they were wrong
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