These people are not the ones who need to take action, so who cares?

Policy makers are the ones who need to act, and they are already well aware for most of the consequences of global warming. The issue is that a lot of big corporations (The ones which really control police makers) are not going to be advantaged by transforming the society to a more respectful one regarding nature. So things move slowly, until things are getting really bad and day to day activities are drastically affected by global warming

Put in another way: regardless whether execs at the oil and flight companies are to blame, or their flying and driving customers, a solution must involve large reductions in the amount of fuel burnt (which inevitably requires making that much more expensive than it is now).

Mind you they're probably the types to start a civil war when private fossil fuel use, gasoline/petrol/diesel, becomes illegal.

We had an immigration wave in Germany in the mid-2010's and all it did was help a right-leaning party without much care for climate change gain power.

Trump is not doing what's right for his supporter, he is doing what companies who paid him ask.

Biden is not doing what's right for his supporter, he is doing what companies who paid him ask.

That's not conspiracy theory, that's the model on which our society is built on

Yes they are - big corporations and governments only do things when the public goes along with them, otherwise they go bust or get voted out.

It will take people making choices, changing the way they live, travel, eat, and buy things and using the products of companies that support that to make any change.

Without going into the religious bits and more spectacular bits of it there is an extremely interesting story going on in the last part of the book of Jonah in Nevi'im (in Christianity this is part of the old testament):

As Jonah tells the inhabitants of Nineveh about the impending doom they repent and the king of Nineveh puts on sackcloth, sits in ashes and makes a proclamation which decrees fasting, the wearing of sackcloth, prayer, and repentance.

Again, without going fully religious, this is an excellent example. When people see their "king" actually doing the thing themselves that they ask others to do, change happens. There is nothing religious about this. Here in Norway, former King Olav V was famous for, among other things, taking the tram during gas rationing in the 70ies.

Old people could still tell me back in the 80ies and 90ies that prince Olav and his siblings had actual porridge for breakfast like other kids.

Today royalty plays less of a role I guess compared to influencers and thought leaders of all kinds, but I still guess it would make a massive difference if next years Davos meeting was announced to be virtual because of climate concerns.

Or if a few tik tok/Instagram stars came out and showed their 2 generation old iPhones saying: I can get a new anytime I want but I actually do care about the environment.

Why?

I mean, okay, getting angry about hypocrisy is fun. But why would you allow someone else's hypocrisy to sway your view of what is or is not objectively true? That is not critical thinking.

My naive take is that it calls into question if the supposed catastrophe (from the 40%'s point of view) is real if the leaders aren't taking it seriously themselves. "objectively true" only works if you understand the problem without, from your point of view, suspicious people explaining it to you. In this case, the suspicious people would be the primary ones telling you that you have to pay this tax while they are mysteriously exempt.

It's not fatigue, it's ostrich politics. "If I don't look at it, it will go away." But it's not a predator, it's essentially a force of nature. We had this kind of (then social) problems being ignored lead to huge revolutions in the past. But this time, getting the head of a few lords abd ladies will be insufficient.

The same is true for New York - any city at or only slightly above sea level is a foregone conclusion. Fluid dynamics don't care about your politics.

If it helps, going by elevation maps Disney World should survive with a lot of weather hardening!

I think it is possible to hold this off for the richest cities. It'll cost a lot to build, maintain and perhaps even upgrade it, for sure. The Netherlands had the big benefit of a major natural gas find in that time that gave a huge boost to the economy, otherwise this wouldn't have been possible. Also, there were less environmental restrictions back then. All that will make it more expensive today.

I don't believe this to be true. If you look at the incentives currently in place they're well short of what could be considered the minimum recommendations of any of the previous reports.

This is not an indicator of a world that takes climate change seriously:

[Saudi oil giant Aramco sees profits soar by almost 300%] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-58141607

But that's part of the problem - there isn't going to be a magic solution to climate change - it involves lots of changes to the way we do things, some small and some big (the way we travel, and build and consume things), most of which we already know about - but often they'll be economically damaging or a change in the way people live.

Basically, to stop climate change in the next decade (which is already far too late to stop catastrophic effects, which are already beginning and will only get worse) we must significantly reduce the global economy. There is simply no way to keep growing growing the economy without also growing CO2 emissions in the near future.

And of course, global economic recession is not going to be acceptable, in an economic system predicated entirely on eternal growth (where "growing too slow" is already considered unacceptable). So, climate change action will be slow, small, and entirely too little to avoid the most catastrophic scenarios.

Better to see 10 more years of economic growth before a massive collapse, instead of 20-40 years of slow economic shrinking to a more manageable, carbon neutral world, right?

So, the only current solution to climate change is global economic contraction - especially in the richest nations.

The things that keep me up at night are not climate change, but runaway feedback loops that yield existential civilizational risk on the order of weeks not decades. For example, a COVID-like R0 virus that is highly fatal but spreads asymptomatically for months before killing hosts. Engineering and deploying such a virus seems plausible for a psychopathic individual over the next several decades. Basically anything where a lone actor can unleash a chain reaction to take out civilization are things we should be very concerned about, since they are total random variables. Getting various hedges in place like physical boundaries between cohesive populations (eg, a Martian colony) seem important to clear before one of these tripwires are hit.

The pessimist in me will only believe any of that, and any positive impact, once it happened. Not sooner.

Thats not a measure to help, thats a fake measure to stop goverments from actually doing something effective.

> When you emit carbon dioxide, the climate stays altered for a long time," says Solomon Hsiang, a climate scientist who is the co-director at the Climate Impact Lab at the University of California, Berkeley. "And so we kind of have to deal with that baggage no matter what."

> Today's adults will be dealing with climate-driven extreme weather for decades to come. But if countries transform their economies to cut heat-trapping emissions sharply, today's kindergartners could inherit a safer world when they reach middle age.

> "It's kind of like you're driving a giant train that's very heavy. You slam on the brakes. The train keeps going for a while," Hsiang explains. "There's some amount of heating that we would continue to experience," even with dramatic cuts to greenhouse gas emissions. It will take decades for forests, oceans and other natural systems to soak up all the excess greenhouse gases that have accumulated in the atmosphere.

Go back and read predictions about the future from a century ago that failed to imagine simple things we take for granted today like telecomms or high speed travel. They're hilarious in grasping with bad analogies to come to strong conclusions like this. This doesn't mean the person is wrong, just that we ought to not take their beliefs as being factual, particularly if we can identify they've failed to try to incorporate technological breakouts grounded in known physics and our expected collective incentives.

You think that would be enough? Don't underestimate how many people would be willing to shrug off mass death and destruction of others if their tribe asked them to ignore it.

Besides being secret and likely buggy, any simulation of the climate necessarily incomplete, i.e. it omits quite a lot of phenomena. Complex systems are fundamentally non-amenable to simulation, but in this case, the results of the "simulation" are garbage squared, because they're "simulations" of some system that doesn't even exist.

This is the kind of stuff being passed off as science these days.

That won't make a difference; Liberals will blame the Floridians themselves for being conservative, and Conservatives will say it was an inevitable part of God's Plan, that saying it shouldn't have happened is a criticism of His Judgment, and that saying that it was caused by humans is claiming the type of power that only belongs to God.