I agree. But so does everyone else. So why point it out unless to argue in favor of despair?
Placing a sufficient price on CO2 emissions would probably do it. Odds of getting our legislatures to do this may be slim, but why not try?
> Exaggeration doesn't help the argument that anthropogenic climate change is a serious problem.
I'm not exaggerating. The EPA's forecasted temperature increase over the next 83 years is a confidence interval with upper bounds at 12F for the USA and 8.6F for the global average. (https://www.epa.gov/climate-change-science/future-climate-ch...) A change of that magnitude will have tremendous consequences:
- Changing rainfall patterns and foundering marine ecosystems might threaten public food and water supplies.
- The resulting economic fallout might create large migrations of people who will have to compete for space in regions of the world already overfull.
- Large regions of the country would become unpleasant to reside in on account of the temperature alone.
- Violence and poverty could become widespread.
These seem to me to be genuine threats that it is realistic to believe that people alive today might face in their old age.
I just think that focusing on human impacts has the best chance. Indeed, your examples are all about human impacts.
When I read "kill the planet", it seems about much more than that. Maybe that's just my ecohippie spiritualism ;)
I am not suggesting that we shouldn't care.
Maybe you're right that there's still a chance of averting catastrophic impact if "we get our act together over the next decade". That's what I've been arguing for decades. But in recent years, the signs of increasing rate of change and positive feedbacks have become much clearer.
What are the chances that the US will cut CO2 emissions by 50% in a decade or two? I'd say that it's about zero. Suburbanization is a huge conundrum. Plus all that old infrastructure. Not to mention the fact that a substantial minority thinks that it's all bullshit, that God is on our side, and that it's all part of immanent Armageddon.