I'm constantly reminded of the cartoon where a heckler is standing up during a Climate Change presentation, yelling, "What if it's a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing?"

I'm a big believer in the scientific method. I think wherever possible we should gather evidence to confirm or deny our hypothesis. But sometimes we have to make decisions without time for all the facts, all the calculations to come in. You could stand there in the street as a car careens toward you, slide rule in hand, being absolutely sure the car will collide with you before finally stepping out of the way. But, of course that's ridiculous.

So, the fear is that making the necessary changes to society would be far too disruptive, too expensive, resulting in ultimately more death and devastation than what Climate Change may or may not bring.

That's quite a gamble. We seem totally fine spending trillions of dollars on other experiments [cough] tax cuts [cough]. We go to war, sacrificing lives and national treasure on uncertain outcomes, on shaky premises, and on and on. Why, with this one issue, are we so reluctant to make the leap with a significant scientific consensus around the issue?

The thing is that is much more complex than just “stepping out of the way”. There’s a cost associated with it and you can’t just get some to buy into it, you need everyone to buy into it for it to work.

> I'm constantly reminded of the cartoon where a heckler is standing up during a Climate Change presentation, yelling, "What if it's a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing?"

The truth is that if climate change really is the catastrophe that people are talking about, we will have to take drastic action that will make the world worse. Maybe we have to convert large portions of our land into solar and wind farms spoiling previously pristine wilderness with installations and power lines? Maybe we will have to embrace nuclear power and decide that having a Chernobyl every decade or so is a tolerable risk? Maybe we will have to decide that seeding with sulfur in the upper atmosphere is required to help with temperatures and that acid rain will just have to be an acceptable trade-off.

If people really believed that climate change was the catastrophe that they say it is, they would be willing to practically give away everything in exchange for getting legislation through that would help climate change. If democrats went to republicans and said "Look, climate change is a life or death thing. If you support an effective global carbon tax, we will support everything else in your platform." You could probably get legislation passed by next month. Of course, nobody really views climate change as being that much of a crisis!

I don't follow your logic. Giving way to a fascist Republican agenda is only going to make climate change worse.

Climate scientists, in an effort to avoid panic, are downplaying the calamity and timescale of this crisis. It's common knowledge in the climate science academic community that the 2018 IPCC report was overly conservative in its modelling of CC progression by lacking any mention of self reinforcing feedback loops.

The two most impactful of these loops are the Arctic sea ice reflectivity loss (less ice -> less incoming light reflected back into space -> more heat captured by earth -> less ice) and the Siberian arctic shelf methane loop, arguably the most devestating one because we already know it caused Earth's worst extinction[0], and it is beginning to happen again[1].

It will be refreshing to see if the scientific community's consensus on how silent to be about the severity of the climate crisis will change as the facts of how rapidly the feedback loops are progressing essentially implicate near-term (10-20 years) civilisational collapse.

More info from the World Research Institute on climate feedback loops:

https://www.wri.org/blog/2018/08/why-positive-climate-feedba...

[0]: https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/earth-permian-mass...

[1]: https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2018/04/28/...

Lands warm up more than oceans. We're already past 1.5°C of temperature rise and we probably won't do anything to prevent 2°C. Most probably, we'll hit +3-+4°C in 2100. However even +2°C is a global average; oceans are cooler, and 75% of the surface. It can easily be +1°C on the oceans, and +5°C on land, averaging to +2°C.

The situation of complex systems such as climate, the world economy and global ecosystems doesn't simply gently degrade over time. There are quick, catastrophic changes that occur rapidly when reaching certain thresholds. So all could be mostly fine for 1 year, or 5, or 10, then collapse suddenly any time because we've gone through one particular threshold we don't know (ocean acidity, surface temperature, oxygen concentration, forests dying from the heat and becoming carbon sources, etc).

Prepare for a tough, violent future. Be scared to death.

This post reminds me of Deep Adaption theory by Professor Jem Bendell.

https://jembendell.wordpress.com/2018/07/26/the-study-on-col...

>Prepare for a tough, violent future. Be scared to death.

This is exactly the type of fearmongering Science avoids.

Science helps us arrive closer and closer to the truth, through hypothesis, experimentation, review, and revision. So yes, by definition science isn't in the business of fear mongering. But that really has no bearing on whether or not people choose to be terrified by the facts uncovered by science.

The IPCC has indeed carefully avoided claims which may appear to be "fearmongering". However, a consequence of this is that they typically discuss the least severe warming scenarios in predictions of the effects of climate change. But the fact is that at current emissions, temperature anomalies of 3 C or more are likely within the next century. Barring large-scale geoengineering on a scale never before attempted, such an amount of warming would be utterly devastating to human civilization. Relevant historical comparisons include the Black Plague and the Spanish flu and not much else. Nine-figure death tolls are not off the menu.

A nine-figure death toll seems optimistic, unfortunately.

I didn't pretend to present a scientific assessment of the situation. However I've been following closely the situation on energy (we are running out of it), other resources (phosphates, essential to industrial agriculture, metals, essential to any industry, particularly the hyped "green energies"), ecology, climate, for the past 15 years and the situation is dire.

You've been diagnosed with terminal cancer. Our models show, according to a majority of experts, that your quality of life will possibly be affected, with a consensus opinion that you may have a 10 to 20 year reduction in expected social interaction.

Sometimes telling it how it is equates to good bedside manner.

When the next local Gamma Ray Burst comes along, the planet will be sterilized.

Am I also fearmongering?

> Prepare for a tough, violent future. Be scared to death.

Anyone with even moderate financial stability will be completely alright. I'm not sure which scenario would be so terrifying as to be scared to death.

Nice financial stability you got there. It'd be a shame if someone came and took it.

In all seriousness, financial stability is wholly a product of political stability. The main risk to humans posed by climate change is political instability resulting from natural disasters, resource conflicts and large-scale displacement. You don't need to be a historian to recall multiple scenarios during the 20th century where financial stability would have had negligible impact on your ability to survive and thrive.

Unless you're sufficiently wealthy to hedge against geopolitical crises and can afford private security contractors and generous bribes, being financially stable just makes you a target. The very poor tend to cope better than the middle classes during periods of extreme instability, because they have the skills and the social network needed to survive. When banknotes become worthless, the shelves are bare or they're forced from their homes, they're not suddenly plunged into chaos - they're on familiar ground.

When was the last time you were absolutely flat broke? When was the last time you didn't know where your next meal was coming from? How many people in your life do you know for certain would risk their lives to protect you from armed thugs? For many people - including many Americans - these questions are not hypotheticals, but facts of life.

"The very poor tend to cope better than the middle classes during periods of extreme instability"

True, the gilets-jaunes are showing remarkable resilience in the face of instability caused by unsustainable taxes imposed by their managerial class and its armed thugs (riot police).

Do you really think so? Take a man's water away for a few days and you will have riots. You think you will be safe behind your wooden doors when you have people outside ready to kill for it? I am a little concerned to be honest even if I can afford the initial hit of it all.

Yes, this is the sociopathic point of view.

There are billions of people who don’t have “moderate financial stability”, sucks to be them I guess?

It's pragmatic. The most cost effective reaction to global warming is transplanting peoples. The maximal impact of global warming, from a cost perspective, will be a rounding error over the next 50 years.

Gaël Giraud, chief economist of the national French agency for development, says that the only economic simulation that reliably tracked actual data for nearly 50 years is World3. He often says that usually, building a model predicting 18 months in the future is a sure way to get the Nobel, but this one is in a class of its own.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World3

Here are some scientists' papers and opinions:

https://sustainable.unimelb.edu.au/publications/research-pap...

https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/09/discovering-limits-to-gro... https://cassandralegacy.blogspot.com/2011/09/cassandra-and-l...

Please, please disconnect yourself from anyone who tells you the US is on the verge of political collapse for any reason.

The EU is suffering from man behind the curtain syndrome, and that farce will be short lived. The outcome will be loud but normative.

So i tried to find the actual UN report. The article linked to this http://www.grida.no/publications/431 but it doesn't appear to exist anymore (??) Luckily there is a Google cached version http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:w_-_g9l... which links to the report https://gridarendal-website-live.s3.amazonaws.com/production...

In the cbc article, they say "According to one study cited in the report, up to 70 per cent of Arctic infrastructure could be threatened because of thawing permafrost by 2050. ". This refers to page 17 of the report, which cites this study https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-07557-4

In the abstract, they clearly state "We show that nearly four million people and 70% of current infrastructure in the permafrost domain are in areas with high potential for thaw of near-surface permafrost." While the CBC sub-headline says "70% of infrastructure will be threatened because of thawing permafrost by 2050"

Seems quite misleading. CBC will have people think that 70% of all infrastructure is threatened (subjective interpretation) whereas the study clearly indicates it's 70% of the infrastructure in the permafrost domain, which affects a whopping 4 million people. I'm sure there will be plans to help those affected in time.

I'm not saying it's not a problem, I'm just saying, as usual, the media hypes and sensationalizes it, most likely for some ulterior agenda.

On one hand I wonder what is the breakthrough that is going to happen that will save us all? Some new energy or carbon removing technology. I fear this will not happen soon enough and that brings me to the other hand at what point will climate change break a nation and what is going to be their response when their back is against the wall and other nations are already strained by climate change. If no one takes them in, what measure will they take to ensure their children live on? At what point will we start seeing other nations carbon emissions as hostile? It seems pretty selfish the way we run the earth now. Perhaps we need to truly pay for our individual emissions. Like sure you want to be a millionaire and run a private jet sure but you will be responsible for not just the cost of it's gas but it's entire emissions as well. You want to sell something that causes emissions, sure but you better add that cost into your products you sell as you will pay for the emissions. And by pay for emissions I mean the true cost. If current world tech costs 100$/kg to remove then you pay 100$ for every kg you release. And by law that money is used for that actual purpose. It seems pretty obvious some industries are reaping the rewards of high emissions with little pay back. That needs to stop. It completely reminds me of the plastic problem where people are selling these products with copious amounts of plastic packaging that ends up in landfills and city's are left trying to deal with the cost of it all.

The only way I see for us to save ourselves is either A: Fusion power comes to life and provides near magical amounts of energy for dirt cheap prices, or B: We start building nuclear fission plants all across the globe, dozens if not more opening per year.

Most of our technical problems comes down to energy requirements; we need to replace most of the world's current electrical usages, we need to replace the world's oil and gas driven transportation structure with electric, we need to replace our natural gas derived fertilizer with air and water derived fertilizer (which costs 100x the energy to produce at best), and that along with the millions of other fossil-fuel derived chemical reagents and materials that don't get counted in most energy requirement surveys, we need to scrub out 200+ years worth of pollution in the air and also the oceans (which has absorbed most of our CO2, hence the acidification), and still accommodate for future increases in energy requirements across the globe.

Quite simply, even if we doubled or tripled our energy production rates tomorrow and it was magically all clean power, we still wouldn't be anywhere near the power requirements we need to build a clean society, and that is before we even start looking at serious CO2 sequestration. It will always take more energy to sequester CO2 than burning the old fuel could ever theoretically produce, and we only harness between 20-50% of the energy released from those fuels even today, with the rest escaping as waste heat, so we have a LOT of extra energy to make up for.

Arab Spring happened in part because food prices went up to not-affordable levels (partly because of 2011 forest fires in Russia destroying their grain harvests), and the Syrian civil war was also triggered because drought caused failed farmers to move into the cities looking for other income, causing social tensions. The chaos has triggered the refugee crisis, turning many European nations into right-wing populism.

So, break a nation? Climate change broke a few already.

The EU governments are already making it hard for refugees to cross the Medditerranean (financing the Libyan Coast Guard to stop "smugglers", as well as camps in Turkey), although all the Neo-Nazis still scream about it, I can imagine that when more right wing governments get voted to "represent" the populace, they'll take even more drastic measures (even more than the Italian government refusing docking rights to ships which rescue refugees).

But could these be just triggers in unstable countries?

You only have to take one look at Egypt demographics to understand Arab (counter-)revolution(s) are inevitable.

https://www.ined.fr/thumb/?q=90&w=1027&h=768&src=/fichier/s_...

This is a desert country, bankrupt for 20 years, and dependent on foreign dollar aid to buy food.

Syria is a vicious civil war, with a minority governing sect fighting for its life against an abused majority.

After 7 decades of democratic progress in the EU, there are bound to be push backs. Is the Brexit insanity related to climate change?

Well-managed China will leverage Green Tech as an economic opportunity. Mis-managed countries will sink lower. Sad but true.

The whole EU clusterfuck is because of Berlin's policy of Austerity uber Alles, especially in the UK. Plus the stupidity of the Euro, which meant tying your currency to Germany's if you join up.

Interesting point about China, do they have a refugee crisis? I suppose being seen as an oppressive regime not scared to shoot at people has its advantages. (I'm a "refugees welcome!" kind of person, although I'm sure the society I live in barely tolerates them, and the situation will not improve.).

Political stability is far, far more fragile than most people would like to imagine. Climate change could be the trigger that breaks an unstable country, but it can also chip away at the foundations of a stable country.

Would unfreezing some of these soils make the soil hospitable to carbon-consuming plants?

Seems like the effect of permafrost melt may be partially mitigated by increased plant growth in those areas: through both gas and soil nutrient sequestration.

Yes, but because those latitudes receive less light, plant growth is hindered somewhat.

The poles are a reservoir of factors that could further contribute to a warming climate and rising sea levels, and with their disruption, the processes will escalate.

The emergence of similar reports might finally cause the conversation around climate change to move out of talking about vague if dire impacts and about policies that resemble austerity pledges, and about mitigation and adaptation. Those seem to have been a taboo so far, but that can't continue.