> all the people who have made confident predictions over the years regarding global warming.

You can't deny that most of the people speaking publicly, and by far the loudest people, are not experts, they are politicians, journalists, and filmmakers. (And tech entrepreneurs...) Many of those have predicted disasters that never happened.

But judging by the downvotes, I guess that's an inconvenient truth.

The actual report is far more balanced. Yes, they are predicting some negative consequences, alongside potential benefits and measures for adapation and mitigation.

https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ar5_wgII_spm...

Of course the IPCC doesn't predict the world is going to end in 12 years. That's a strawman - I'm sure you can find someone who has predicted the world will end in 12 years, but that isn't the disaster people are concerned about.

Instead, they collect five key "reasons for concern" by "using the following specific criteria: large magnitude, high probability, or irreversibility of impacts; timing of impacts; persistent vulnerability or exposure contributing to risks; or limited potential to reduce risks through adaptation or mitigation." [2]

Some of the risks associated with these include:

Risk of death, injury, ill-health, or disrupted livelihoods in low-lying coastal zones and small island developing states and other smallislands, due to storm surges, coastal flooding, and sea level rise.

...

Risk of food insecurity and the breakdown of food systems linked to warming, drought, flooding, and precipitation variability and extremes,particularly for poorer populations in urban and rural settings.

[1] https://www.ipcc.ch/reports/ (click "Assessment Reports")

[2] Pg 12, https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ar5_wgII_spm...

"The world is going to end in 12 years..." is a recent famous quote by a prominent Democrat. I'm surprised you haven't heard it.

Personally, I bought into the climate alarmism about 30 years ago, and my skepticism is based on seeing so many things I've heard and read (even from scientists) turn out to be exaggerated.

This isn't true, and you should probably cut whatever source told it to you out of your life. The world is going to end if we don't take action within 12 years, which is the gist of what the IPCC report says.

It doesn't matter.

"The world is going to end if we don't take action within 12 years" is also false, and not at all what the IPCC report says. When O'Rourke said something similar, the AP fact checked the claim:[2]

> THE FACTS: There is no scientific consensus, much less unanimity, that the planet only has 12 years to fix the problem.

> “This has been a persistent source of confusion,” agreed Kristie L. Ebi, director of the Center for Health and the Global Environment at the University of Washington in Seattle. “The report never said we only have 12 years left.”

And no, I'm not going to cut the AP and PBS out of my life just because some alarmists are delusional.

1: https://apnews.com/1c663bcb294c1752573f45fc5bf5e0f9/

2: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/ap-fact-check-orourke-...

And the IPCC Summary for Policymakers itself misrepresents what the actual science says. All of the caveats, disclaimers, hedges, and so forth in the scientific working group reports (and even more so the caveats, disclaimers, hedges, etc. in the actual peer-reviewed papers on which the working group reports are based) are ignored in the Summary for Policymakers. The policy recommendations are already determined and published before the scientific working group reports are released.

So there are actually three levels of misrepresentation involved: first the IPCC WG reports misrepresent the actual primary sources; then the IPCC SPM misrepresents the WG reports; then journalists and politicians misrepresent the IPCC SPM. At each stage the predictions get more alarmist and the recommendations get more draconian.

No, they haven't. The IPCC reports are political documents, not scientific documents. One key fact that shows this: the Summary for Policymakers is written and published before any of the Working Group reports, and the Working Group reports then have to be edited and massaged to be consistent with what the Summary for Policymakers says. A true scientific report with scientific predictions would be the other way around: first you would write, review, and publish the scientific analysis and predictions, and then you would write, review, and publish the policy recommendations.

However, directionally speaking, they have an excellent point that people who predict the future are very common in the climate lobby; and within that group people who correctly predict the future are going to be rare. It is not a lobby made up of scientists because there aren't that many.

I think you are conflating two different possible meanings of the term "threat".

Climate change is likely to be much more of a "threat" than COVID-19 in the sense that we are likely going to have to be dealing with it for a much longer time. But humanity has already been dealing with climate change through all of human history, so having to deal with it for the indefinite future is nothing new. It's only more of a "threat" in the sense of it being a long-term thing we need to factor into our planning, as opposed to COVID-19 being (hopefully) a short-term crisis that we weather and then move on.

Climate change is not more of a "threat" than COVID-19 in the sense of causing more disruption to our society; COVID-19 has already caused far more disruption in a few months than climate change has caused over decades, if not centuries, and also far more than climate change is likely to cause in the future. Time frames matter. Having to restructure the global economy over a century is one thing; that's already been done multiple times in the past, and happens as a natural result of people gradually changing the way they live and work in response to other changes. Having to restructure it in a few months is a very, very different (and much, much more difficult) problem. In that sense COVID-19 is a far worse threat than climate change.

Most obvious is the definition of "deal with." During the ice age transitions "deal with" more or less meant "survive - barely."

If you're happy for humanity to "survive - barely" for the next couple of centuries, then perhaps you have a point.

But our definition of humanity is much richer and more interesting than it was at the end of the Younger Dryas some 14,000 years ago.

Now a reasonable definition of "deal with" is "survive without losing significant acquired knowledge or skill."

That's a much bigger ask when survival-critical choke points are all on the line, which include food production, water supply, and the loss of key living and working space on the coastlines are all on the line. And that's not even considering the general inhabitability of inland areas that will become increasingly prone to storms, floods, forest fires, tornadoes, and so on.

We can already see this happening. Denying it is a form of delusion, in very stark and literal terms.

In fact the political problem we're dealing with is a cult-like mindset that considers "the economy" more real than the physical environment it exists in.

The bottom line is that "the economy" is a quasi-religious political construct, while the real world is... the real world. The economy needs to change, because otherwise reality will kick its ass whether it likes it or not.

The change can be planned and strategised intelligently as an immediate priority, or it can be suicidally chaotic, with huge unplanned loss of acquired knowledge and future potential.

Those are the two extremes on offer. There are no others.

COVID-19 is a handy dry run. We'll see how we do.

That's how humans have lived for almost all of human history; only in the last couple of centuries have a significant number of humans been able to have a standard of living much above bare subsistence.

> The economy needs to change

The economy is always changing, just like the climate. We certainly need people to be inventing new technologies and creating wealth; that's how the economy changes in response to changing conditions and changing needs.

What we do not need is a bunch of draconian centrally controlled policies that will do more harm than good, based on invalid alarmist predictions.

> The change can be planned and strategised intelligently

Nobody knows how to do that on a global scale. No such planning and strategizing has succeeded in the past. To use your phrase, reality has always kicked the ass of such planning and strategizing.

Fortunately, we do not need a central authority planning and strategizing everything. What we need is to do common sense things to make our society and economy more robust, and give people the tools they need to adapt to change in whatever way seems best to them given the unique conditions of their own lives, instead of having policies dictated to them from the top down.

There's a story that a Soviet minister of something or other was visiting London and asked some UK government official who was in charge of the daily supply of bread to the city. He was utterly unable to fathom the answer, which was "nobody". Central planners just can't get it through their heads that central planning doesn't work.

To the extent your 1) and 2) are reasonable categories, I don't see PG giving any examples of 1). I see him giving examples of 2) trying to pass themselves off as 1). Which is what I see happening with claims of catastrophe related to climate change.