> You seem to think the unpleasantness of the diagnosis and remedy gives you and yours an out.
This is such an interesting observation. I had always thought that with a dire enough problem, humanity would band together and come up with a solution at all cost.
But after observing the worldwide response to the pandemic, I’m quite sure the world will become engulfed in wildfire and famine while a notable fraction of the population continues to insist that “this is normal and everything is fine”.
It’s an odd situation where magical thinking (“it can’t happen to me”) negates self-preservation.
The IPCC has been making dire predictions now for 3 decades. Can you point to any that came true?
Off the top of my head I know that
1. Glacier park was to vanish by 2020. Its still there, barely changed, some glaciers shrank, others grew.
2. Sea level didn't rise as expected.
3 Polar bears are strong, and are not on the endangered list.
4. Temperatures did not rise as much as expected. We are still way below the Roman and Bronze age warm periods.
5. Damage from weather has increased in America, but that is a result of a policy to rebuild, instead of abandoning areas prone to bad weather. Increasing the probability of being damaged by bad weather. Actual weather severity has not changed much.
6. In school, I was made to feel terrified of desertification. The opposite happened, the deserts retreated. The globe is greening.
As I said, that is off the top of my head, but it can all be backed up by data. Or prove me wrong. Can you show me a few ipcc predictions which actually came true? Thanks.
The IPCC does not make predictions. Never has, never will. The whole point, which real climate scientists repeat as nauseum, is we can never know absolutes because of the huge number of variables and timeframes. So what they do instead is provide scenarios. And each scenario has a series of weightings or probabilities. The summaries spell these out in rough terms, the full reports go into intricate detail and sources. If you spend the time to read the summaries you will find a good number of scenarios which are currently playing out as we speak.
Thousands of researchers making predictions with ever shifting probabilities is what you call unfalsifiable.
The predictions we’re talking about play out over decades. The sources cite other predictions. It’s a feedback loop of assumptions and peer review from people who you know already share the same assumptions.
Climate science is much more akin to sociology than a hard science.
Except climate science has tons and tons of hard data that the models need to agree with to be publishable, whereas sociology has questionnaires administered to a group of 20 sociology students.
> The idea that we should eliminate fossil fuels is truly a privileged take.
It is, and it's our only option. It's the reason nobody is doing a lot to combat climate change: because it'll require a lot of tears, effort and money, and nobody wants or can afford to spend them.
At the end, it's always the poor that have to pay. It's always been like that. Doesn't make climate change any less real.
Climate change is indeed a justice problem and we should optimize for justice rather than just raw temperature management. There are "solutions" that cause more injustice by denying efficient energy to the global poor.
But the wealthy people who make this argument tend to argue for total inaction rather than a justice-focused approach where they sacrifice greatly in order to permit the global poor to have access to efficient energy for as long as possible.
It's difficult to believe the working class in America should bear the sacrifice when the richest people in the world just flew their private jets to a lavish climate conference thousands of miles from home to discuss how much the working class should sacrifice.
Any sacrifice that is called for should start at the top.
Cool. I think you'll find that a large number of climate activists are very on board with pretty extreme policies pulling from the rich. The people calling it "superstition" tend to be people who don't support high taxes on the wealthy.
That may be true at the grassroots level, but I've never seen it materialize at the policy level.
Perhaps I've missed something. Could you cite an example of an actual (not merely theoretical) climate policy that pulls from the rich without hurting the working class?
How many of them have a private jet? Your working class American might make 5 times as much as a person living in the third world, but the clowns at this climate conference are easily 1,000 times as rich. Your comparison is meaningless.
So because removing fossil fuels will be difficult to do, we shouldn't try and we should instead bury our head in the sand about the very real problems that lay ahead of us?
Yes, this is precisely why we should have phased these out in the first world (and required the same of our business partners in the second world) decades ago. The longer we wait, the worse it will be. It’s like credit card debt—if you stop depending on it, you’ll have a little less money in the short term, but you need to or you’ll have much less money in the long term.
