But is it really “alarmism” to yell at people inside a house on fire that they need to “get the hell out now!” even if some people in a separate part of the building (not touched by the fire yet) insist that the growing heat is due to something else, God has it in control and would never set the fire, in fact the people yelling out the warnings are just being “alarmist”, it’s against their constitutional rights etc? We really don’t have time at the moment to resort to gentle persuasion techniques (on a group I might add who are ready to never become convinced because they dismiss every rational argument and all the data). It may not work in a country as politically divided as the US, but trying to convince (the right especially) will achieve nothing but waste time that could be better spent elsewhere. Those who are not persuaded at this point are not going to be just because we approach them with more gentleness or empathy or whatever.

Even if we could convince people that they must get moving and that the fire is real, people will be frozen in discussion over which path of escape is best. Maybe they should use the fire escape, or reach the roof, or take the window, or maybe that fire extinguishers but then the question if the kitchen or the basement is closer. Alternative they will argue that the best method might be to wait for a firefighter and do what they do. If we follow the analog further we would also have people arguing about which people is responsible to fight the fire, who deserve the take the blame, who should be faced with the consequence, whose parent designed the building, whose people is responsible for voting those who made the building regulations, who owns most properties, and finally who invaded whom a few hundred years ago. All while standing inside the ongoing fire.

I honestly don't know what can be done.

It would be considered alarmist to yell fire to people who had no concept of fire, and if the actual flames were years or decades away.

They won’t thank you until after they see someone being burned.

But in this case wouldn’t it be more like they keep seeing people around them being burnt to death all the time, and you have a pretty solid theory of why this happens / how to predict the next burn victims, but they keep insisting it’s actually spontaneous combustion and you’re just being “alarmist” with your predictions of further (and even worse) burnings?

Well the catastrophic ends of climate change are just that… ends.

Right now we have had effects but it’s all akin to feeling heat, or coughing from smoke but not actually being burned. Also the heat and smoke randomly shifts to other people so it isn’t consistently hurting anyone.

What’s worse is that we either all escape the building together or we all die together. No one can just choose to believe the theory of the unseen flame and get out alive on their own.

>But is it really “alarmism” to yell at people inside a house on fire that they need to “get the hell out now!”

OK, I did use the wrong word there (looking it up, "alarmism" carries different connotations to what I thought), but frankly that's beside the point.

If you want to enact real change (getting people out of the building), and yelling at them about how they're going to die for 4 hours straight has been ineffective, perhaps it's time to try a different strategy.

Alarmist statements DO seem to work though looking at the previous term’s statements on immigration.

There has to be tons of reasons it’s not working in this case, but I don’t think it’s the alarmist portrayal. I suspect it should be far more alarming.

In the Canadian federal election a couple of weeks ago, 95% of votes went to parties that had a carbon tax of some sort in their platform.

Canadians aren't very different from Americans. It can be done.

The people are similar, yes. The underlying socioeconomic and sociopolitical systems are likely different tho'. We (i.e., the USA) too often talk a good game, but the actions are disconnected.

Just one example, the Paris Climate Agreement isn't what most believe it is. The targets aren't tight enough, and there's nothing binding. Compliance is voluntary. Yet it has been and continues to be heralded as essential. An essential paper tiger?

Per Naomi Klein

https://www.wnyc.org/story/coveringclimatenow-naomi-klein-gr...

Of course there are other examples.

I agree the US is a bit more oligarchic than other similar nations, but not sure what the Paris climate accord examples proves?

America was the main holdout, and it wasnt because they thought it wasn't effective enough, quite the opposite. So yes its pretty vital that we do at least that much.

It proves this...it was sold as a major accomplishment. It was sold as one of that POTUS' defining moments. And it wasn't any of that. The USA held it up. The USA made sure it had no teeth.

So the talk was "We're so great" the reality is that's BS.

How many Canadians are there in the CCP leadership? China is around 30% of the globes emissions, Canada is 1.5%.

Alarmist statements are not going to do anything to Chinese policy. The only thing that is going to work is having a technically better source of energy to move to.

There is a straight forward (but not easy) solution to the China problem. It's called the carbon club, and William Nordhaus won the Nobel Memorial prize for his paper on it. Germany is currently leading the charge to get one set up.

The EU has a pretty history of forcing their citizens foot the bill for lazy corporations failure to do anything in the interest of society or humanity. The most recent example was when they(Germans, EU) was pushing for a digitalization tax so that corporations could have the tax payer foot the bill for their failure to invest money into themselves rather than funeling it out. There are countless examples of this happening in institutions within Germany that used to be public and were half privatized.

Carbon tax is yet another one of these examples where the tax payer has been sold on the idea that they have to foot the bill for the big corps selfishness.

Completely absurd that these things are even presented as a solution. As for China being a problem? I think all the people that worked decades to push everything to China with complete disregard for anything share some blame?

And then at the same time the IAEA was actually supposed to be an institution to help the world forward in safe nuclear energy development.

Talking about Chinas carbon footprint, while ignoring why it's the worlds biggest polluter is kinda how we kept saying how horrible their and some other countries in the areas ocean trash pollution is while omitting that we were the ones shipping our trash there.

But yes, this is the past and now it's different, but just erasing history doesn't give a good ground for a constructive discussion.

And re: carbon club and China, Germany will never defy China. It's their biggest importer. In the end it's all rhetoric. They just recently released a statement how they want to discuss the Xinjiang issue on mutual understanding. They spent a decade promising other countries to setup a parallel remittance system, which never materialized. It's all talk and no substance

i disagree that it would have efficacy, china already is trying to build parallel economic system if needed with cultivation of economic relation in south america and africa. china setting herself up to be to those continents as we were to her, will survive without any carbon membership.

You know what those emissions in China are for right? China is the factory of the world, they build the things that we consume. So applying a carbon tax in Canada will make those goods more expensive and reduce the demand, reducing China's footprint.

A carbon tax without tariffs would not work. The big question is if Canada can impose such tariffs that locally produced low-carbon emitting products has a economical advantage over those produced and later shipped from china.

Climate change news reminds me of that "truck almost hitting a pole" meme [1]. I know it's a growing problem that will likely mean big, uncomfortable changes, but the constant crisis rhetoric is just exhausting. I'm GenX so I've been hearing this every day of my life for decades. Right in that awkward age between the generation that doesn't care even in the slightest about Climate Change and the generation that thinks it's the worst problem the world has ever faced.

Politicians my age are slowly seeping into power now. If Climate Change activists want to convince them, constant Dialed-up-to-10 alarmism is just not the way they're going to do it.

1: https://imgur.com/r/gifs/kuplW0m

Well, thing is the alternative is absolutely possible, and we’re seeing it: people getting more expensive energy prices, mosquitoes appear in regions where they traditionally weren’t, causing health issues, insurance premiums increasing, coverage decreased for some types of events (here in Chicago insurance don’t cover for flooding of your basement). Small steps are certainly being taken by nature to make everything significantly more expansive and less comfortable than they should be. But hey, people who could influence this have the money to cover for that so let’s remain on the status quo a little longer.

Are you suggesting that basement flooding in Chicago is due to climate change?

I agree. Alarmist rhetoric since at least the mid-1980s. We've made massive progress on environmental issues since then, but still the same alarmist rhetoric.

> We've made massive progress on environmental issues

Care to elaborate? Afaic, global CO2 emissions keep going up year after year.

Not GP, but in other areas (chemical pollution, CFCs, recycling, sustainable forestry) we've definitely made improvements since then. Global warming seems to be a particularly tough nut to crack.

Additionally, we’re dramatically more energy efficient across the board; food, transport, goods.

You're victim blaming.

What an utterly useless statement. What are you suggesting we do instead, downplay the danger and hope someone will eventually do something?

You know, if someone predicted the apocalypse was right around the corner, and the only way to avert it was to dramatically change my lifestyle in a way that was orthogonal to the catastrophe...

I'd say you're peddling religion. Especially if I don't change, and the doomsday prophecies fail. (Again, and again, and again...)

There's been 50 years of climate catastrophe predictions and the one constant is that [everyone] passionate about it has a wicked case of confirmation bias.

The climate scientists generally haven't been doing the catastrophe predictions. If you go back and read the early IPCC reports, it's not like they were predicting the end of the world was nigh. In fact, they still don't predict that. What they do predict is severe consequences that will have high adaptation costs if we don't limit the amount of warming. They don't predict the end of humanity, but just a big cost to humanity.

The activism comes from people who misrepresent the science. The skepticism also comes from people who misrepresent the science. The public debate is almost orthogonal to what the actual science in the IPCC reports says.

To give an example, the IPCC AR5 (2013) report says this:

"More recent assessments indicate that it is unlikely that annual numbers of tropical storms, hurricanes and major hurricanes counts have increased over the past 100 years in the North Atlantic basin. Evidence, however, is for a virtually certain increase in the frequency and intensity of the strongest tropical cyclones since the 1970s in that region."

An activist picks out the second part and ignores the first. A skeptic picks out the first part and ignores the second. They battle it out, each citing "the science", and both are lying by omission. And that's the best case scenario. Often what gets cited isn't even in the IPCC reports, and of a lineage which is more dubious.

Which is why, if you want to have an informed opinion on the climate, you should ignore the media, ignore the talking heads, and read the IPCC reports.

Also constant is the fact that the catastrophe continues to unfold at a rate that falls neatly into the uncanny valley between "slow and marginal enough that most human beings can't seem to comprehend it as a catastrophe" (possibly reflected in your comment) and "fast enough at geological and ecological time scales that human beings have fewer tools for predicting what the hell is actually going to happen" (but some of the possibilities look ugly enough to be alarming).

Catastrophic events are happening you just live in a country that can deal with it-for now at least.

This summer we saw floods kill people in Germany and Belgium while in the Netherlands nobody died because it spent a fuck ton of money on flood defences.

Solutions like that are described in great details in a book False Alarm. It was the first book about climate change (for me) that demonstrated how one can agree with the idea of changing climate, yet approach the problem with a level head and practical solutions. Can't recommend highly enough.

The flood mitigation that the Dutch have implemented is just unbelievably impressive.

Science doesn't tell you what to do, only what (probably) is as can be observed and deducted. I can believe in science without believing in your call to action. These past two years have been all about another natural disaster where two sides see the same statistic and come to different conclusions about what to do about it while accusing each other of being anti science

I really wish this phase could be banned. It's tiresome and in bad faith.

Is that really the problem here? Is that really what you should be focusing on?

Science is a method, it's not religion. You can't really "believe" in science. You can trust its methods though.

Which this person clearly is not doing. But thanks for making a pointless and pedantic distraction I guess?

What you are describing is religion, not science.

Oh yes, I am the problem here. Clearly. That is the logical conclusion to come to under these circumstances.

Seriously?