In terms of bad faith/good faith arguments. One can argue in good faith, that the large amounts of uncertainty associated with the climate models means that the worst case outcomes can not be definitively ruled out and therefore humanity should plan for the worst case scenario as a precautionary measure. And based on this argument, made in good faith, and also based on the fact that it has been extremely difficult to get the necessary global political buy-in to actually make any progress on the problem, one could justify being extremely alarmist about the problem.
I will give you credit though, for attempting to make a good faith argument for why climate change alarmism might be overblown. But I think you fail to acknowledge the large uncertainties involved with climate modeling, and you are also ignoring some of the more alarming risks that were well with in the realm of possibility based on the models. And I also think your economic argument is just flat out wrong. WWII mobilization was followed by some of the most prosperous decades in US history.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/oct/08/world-... [2] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/new-climate-repor...
But despite all of the complexities in the science, I think people have missed the human element. The hundreds of thousands of people that have already died from climate change, such as: the increase in tropical cyclones, the crop failures which sparked the Syrian civil war, the mass migration therefrom which has sparked the rise of nativism and right populism in Western democracies, expansion of harmful insects into environments that used to be too cold to support them that cause fires or famines, and the water shortages worldwide which add economic stress to the people. None of these things are directly attributable to climate change, but collectively they set a story that we're already in the middle of a climate disaster.
Will we all die? No. But the mass death and destruction is already around us. And if we keep burning fossil fuels, it can only get worse.
> would be worse for the economy than just letting climate change happen, at least based on the current science
Uhm, I don't think peoples primary concern about climate change is that it may hurt the economy somewhat?
Where you see gaps are in discrete issues that are highly politicized, such as climate change and COVID. In those areas, valid differences in policy approaches get muddled together with differences in facts.
Left-leaning journalist Matt Yglesias takes this on in the context of climate change in his new book: https://www.aei.org/economics/the-case-for-one-billion-ameri...
He explains that according to experts, climate change will be “like really bad, but not that bad” such that the solution is to take steps to address it while continuing to grow the economy. He explains that the people who think we’re all going to die from climate change (folks on his own side) are probably wrong.
> Taking those problems seriously means investing in solving them, not telling ourselves, “Well, we’re just going to whittle the population down, or somehow everybody’s going to go live in a shack in a hillside there.”
> Still, it is a fundamental difference in worldview. Some people are very driven by a pastoralist notion that we can conserve our way to solving the problem. A billion Americans is not about that. It is about a bigger, richer, more dynamic society.
The facts around climate change are complicated and when it trickles down into the political sphere it tends to get cast in binary terms, because that’s the nature of public political debate. The reality is nuanced: https://reason.com/2019/04/05/rep-alexandria-ocasio-cortez-i...
> According the report: "Under the no-policy baseline scenario, temperature rises by 3.66°C by 2100, resulting in a global gross domestic product (GDP) loss of 2.6%," as opposed to 0.3 percent under the 1.5°C scenario and 0.5 percent under the 2°C scenario. In the baseline 3.66°C projection, the estimate of future GDP losses ranged from a low of 0.5 percent to a high of 8.2 percent. In other words, if humanity does nothing whatsoever to abate greenhouse gas emissions, the worst-case scenario is that global GDP in 2100 would be 8.2 percent lower than it would otherwise be.
There is a legitimate argument that a Green New Deal type solutions that involve a WWII-style economic mobilization would be worse for the economy than just letting climate change happen, at least based on the current science. (Note the EU’s Green Deal has a price tag that’s one-sixth of the price tag for the Green New Deal as proposed.)
Of course by the time this filters into the public debate, it gets reduced to “climate change isn’t happening” versus “we have a 12 year expiration date.” And on both sides, the understanding of the actual science case be very shallow. I know college-educated people who say they won’t have kids because of climate change. This is either pretextual, or pretty misinformed about what scientists think will happen. A lot of people don’t really care about the facts, they just repeat what people on “their team” say.