Say you're a week from the paper being due, and need to decide between an A thesis and a B thesis.
The A thesis would be great, but you simply can't do the research necessary to prove it in a week. If you went with it your paper would be a complete failure because you'd either spend all your time on research and not have enough time to do the actual writing of the paper, or you decide to spend most of your time writing the paper but it's impossibly to make the arguments because you simply don't have the facts necessary.
Instead you pick the B quality thesis, and write a workable paper arguing for it. Sure your paper would be better with a better thesis, but given your position when you started it was your best option.
With climate change, if we let perfect be the enemy of the good we might end up doing nothing which is clearly worse than doing something insufficient. Badness scales (nonlinearly) with amount we reduce emissions. We want the best solution we have the ability to implement. (Figuring that out is the hard part, and I don't know enough to do that).
Note: Your source is worthless in this forum. No one is going to read through hundreds of pages to figure out if they support your claim. It would be as if I wrote nothing but "You're wrong (cite the Encylcopedia Brittanica)". I'm pretty sure you're right, ironically because of reputable secondary sources I've read that summarized the report.
That is exactly what you are doing in arguing for delay and moderation. To the tune of 38 gigatonnes per year.
> Note: Your source is worthless in this forum. No one is going to read through hundreds of pages to figure out if they support your claim.
I linked to a JPG with three 1960 - 2100 graphs that lay out exactly what number of gigatons leads to what warming on what timeframe. It is "Figure 1" from the "Summary for Policy Makers". There is nothing more basic or dumbed down that can still be called science.
I'm arguing for implementing an imperfect plan sooner. I don't understand what you mean.
> I linked to a JPG with three 1960 - 2100 graphs that lay out exactly what number of gigatons leads to what warming on what timeframe. It is the absolute barest possible minimum you should understand to have an informed opinion on the topic.
You're completely right. I saw the start of the link and assumed you linked to the full report.
then why did you start with
> Why I think you reach the wrong conclusion
I confess I got lost in your extended hypotheticals, but your clear intent was to contradict no?
> We have unfortunately blown our time window for a moderate response.
Because I believe our best option is to work for a moderate response sooner, for the reasons I've already said
There's a million ways how some bad steps being taken could end up in a catastrophe. Look at the situation with the Amazon and how aggressive some countries are against the Brazilian government. Some countries (France) are even bypassing the government to deal with local authorities. Situations like that can very quickly spiral out of control. They might make people be even less accepting of doing something about climate change and they can even spark political instability, which very well can lead to hot conflicts.
The climate situation is going to progressively get worse. It will even accelerate the rate at which it gets worse, but it's not going to explode like a bomb. Political situations can explode like that and when that happens, then nobody will care about climate change.
We can't afford not to be moderate on an issue like this. You can't solve climate change at once. It'll take sustained effort and a lot of time. You can't build it on shaky ground.
>hacker news is swarming with climate change denalists downvoters.
This type of attitude is a huge problem for people advocating for changes to be made due to climate change. You're asking for a lot of people's lives to become more difficult, but when they question or disagree on almost any point they are labelled evil and stupid.
Exactly. This is true of most policy disagreements. Just because you think my plan won't do what I propose it will do doesn't mean you're stupid and evil, even if some other people are opposing it because they are stupid and evil.
edit: yet again i'm downvoted to -2 because I dare explain the shape of the curves in plain english and then link to my source (the canonical authoritative source no less).
hacker news is swarming with climate change denalists downvoters.