You know what is the biggest cause of global malnutrition? Climate change, because it is causing more erratic weather patterns that destroy harvests worldwide.

You know what the biggest cause is for the spreading of the malaria mosquitoes beyond the tropics? Climate change again, because it makes some (highly-populated) regions a more favourable habitat.

Climate change isn't some hypothetical problem anymore, like it was in 1850. It is here now, and is already causing problems like you mentioned, that we are spending so much money on countering. But we're treating symptoms, not the cause. I fully expect our spend on treating the symptoms of climate change will rise to unmanageable levels in mere decades.

But I'll respond anyway. From http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs266/en/:

> climate change is expected to cause approximately 250 000 additional deaths per year between 2030 and 2050; 38 000 due to heat exposure in elderly people, 48 000 due to diarrhoea, 60 000 due to malaria, and 95 000 due to childhood undernutrition

Meanwhile, today malaria is killing around 600 000 people a year (ten times that number), and malnutrition around 3 million (thirty times). So, while I'm open to convincing, color me skeptical that today, climate change is the "biggest cause" of those things, for any reasonable definition of "biggest cause".

(Granted, you said "spreading of the malaria mosquitos beyond the tropics". To the extent that this problem is different from the problem of malaria in general, it's moving the goalposts.)

(I also note that even if climate change were the biggest cause of those problems, the best solution to those specific problems might not be to fight climate change. Perhaps instead we should work on growing more resistant wheat, or eradicating mosquitos.)

I'm not arguing that climate change isn't real or that we shouldn't try to solve it. But I categorically reject the idea that if it weren't real, we should nevertheless act as though it were.

I understood what you said, but in my view you were painting a false dichotomy: it's not a matter of "either climate change or all-these-other-useful-things", it's a matter of "all-these-other-useful-things because of our inability to address climate change directly".

what do we do when people treat their opposition as faith, i.e. belief despite lack of evidence.

for some people it will never be real. what do we do about that? is that a legitimate thing to take into account? does that faith mean we cannot act as though climate change is largely human-driven?

You don't wait until you've proven it beyond doubt. But you say "this is our best model, we're pretty confident it's right in the essentials, and we're going to act on it but remain open to being wrong; here are our policy proposals". You don't say "this is our best model, and here are our policy proposals based on it, but even if our model is wrong we would make the same proposals anyway".

I have no particular insights into the other questions.

'what do you mean you don't know, you're not sure? you could be wrong?!'

that's how people see that. that's why climate science needs to give concrete beyond doubt proof. anything less and people ignore it.

You are not helping with that.

In interconnected systems, there's an opportunity cost to opportunity cost.

Once you step into more generations though, fertility rates drop as child survivability rises, as it becomes much more viable to rely on a few children as insurance for old age. Source: Hans Rosling, Gapminder

It would be really surprising if our best-value course of action, relating to climate change, was exactly the same regardless of whether climate change were human-influenced or not.

we know that pushing this button has coincided with a change in climate trends over the last 200 years. what we have to prove is then that a. this is not a natural change, and b. this change can be slowed down or reversed.

would you say that if science proved we are past the tipping point that nothing should be done to reverse the effect we've already had?

I think it's clear that if we could know, and if we could all agree on that, that it would be important to accomplish. but I don't think we can ever all agree on it. so it's not important to accomplish (in fact you could say it's already been accomplished, we already know, and it's not enough, we don't all agree despite the fact. that's what I'm trying to get across by arguing the point of human-caused real climate change)

I am not convinced that "making obviously terrible arguments" is an effective way to shut up one's political opponents.