>People will be able to smell the bullshit. The idea that climate change will be apocalyptic (for first world nations) in your grandchildren's time frame is just as loony-toons as denying it exists at all.

Who said apocalyptic? I said, sooner; even a millisecond reduction in lifespan is sooner.

> The scientific consensus is nowhere near that bad.

Behavioural changes due to climate change leading to increase in skin cancer already has scientific consensus even in our lifetime.

>(for first world nations)

Oh, right /s.

I'm taking no particular position, because I don't go out of my way to read on the subject, but I did notice an article recently which said that we seem to be firmly on the worst of the likely IPCC scenarios from a few years ago, not in the middle.

The media have been pushing hard on the idea that we're living in the worst-case RCP8.5 IPCC scenario. The article that particularly annoyed me was the Atlantic one which based this claim on a Twitter thread that, if you actually clicked through to it, showed us right in the middle of the middle two IPCC scenarios plain as day on the graph. (The tweet actually claimed that we were closer to RCP8.5 than he'd like, which is of course true since all the emissions scenarios are relatively close together early on and he wants us on the best one.) It's not true, of course. Similarly, RCP8.5 is not the "business as usual" scenario that happens if we don't take action, as the media also likes to suggests - it actually requires a rather improbable combination of events. The media are actively making people less informed on this stuff in order to sell fear and a narrative.

Unfortunately, so far I have seen the opposite - people lapping it up and the "consensus" on the Internet (Reddit in particular) being that we're all doomed, with the more extreme outliers thinking about suicide because they genuinely expect the world to _inevitably_ become a literal Mad Max desert dystopia within the next few decades.

We've swung way too far from "completely ignoring the problem" to "absolute frenzy". Reminds me of Y2K.

Also, of course, if you don't agree with the hivemind (that everything is going to be much worse than actual science predicts), then you're a terrible person and need to be at least downvoted to hell, but ideally shunned and have your life ruined.

>Reminds me of Y2K.

Well, people say Y2K wasn't a problem because we buckled down and solved it.

I just saw an article that claimed the UK was back to like 1890 levels of CO2 emissions. Maybe it's still salvageable if the US gets shaken out of its stupor. Maybe decarbonization will just happen anyway through market forces as renewable energy improves.

> Well, people say Y2K wasn't a problem because we buckled down and solved it.

That's why I think it's a good parallel:

1. Something that would be an issue if nothing was done.

2. By the time the public got into a frenzy over it, things were already being done.

3. (Hopefully) will turn out to be a non-issue because things were done.

What are you basing this on?

If the heat doesn’t kill people, famine, floods, fires and wars likely will.

It might not be the apocalypse, but further rises in temperature could easily topple civilisation as we know it?

Paired with social uprising, drought, and mass immigration.

1176 BC, the year the bronze age around the Mediterranean collapsed for all the above reasons (plus earthquakes).

We should learn the lessons of what history says about this period. It took 300 years for them to recover...