"we have perhaps a decade to get emissions under control"

Every year we're told it's our absolute last chance. Environmental brinkmanship hasn't work and the tune needs to be changed. Literally no economies are planning for mass famine or wars because no-one actually believes that is going to happen, except religious cults.

Because every year IS our absolute last chance. Each emitted ton is there "forever" (at least for multiple centuries). Climate change can be stopped (like, paused indefinitely) but can't be reversed.

You are right that there is no absolute deadline. Now we are stuck with our hotter summers "forever". But we are not yet stuck with what comes next.

> no-one actually believes that is going to happen

That is the problem exactly. We do not listen to scientists, because it's more convenient to ignore it. And when their models become reality, we'll just blame them for it, as they "knew" and did not prevent it.

All I'm going to say is always look at where these 'scientists' are getting their funding from. I'm not a climate denier, but realize much of the NGD is really a redistribution of funds. Driving EV machines will still require electricity, most of which is still generated by fossil fuels. Then there's the quagmire of what to do with spent batteries. The Earth has heated and cooled over millions of years, so I really doubt we're at the point of no return.

>Driving EV machines will still require electricity, most of which is still generated by fossil fuels.

Most, compared to all. And power plants are much more efficient at capturing energy than internal combustible engines. I see no real issues with the technology, just small kinks to be worked out, which is expected

Every year the goalposts move a little bit. Thirty years ago the goal was ca. 0° of global warming. Now we're debating whether we can muster the political will to limit warming to 2° (unlikely) or 3°.

Could it also be our understanding is gradually improving and the externalities are just lagging more than first thought?

No,it’s mainly that business won’t change until it’s forced on them. Big tragedy of the commons problem

Right. They want regulation...but NOT THAT REGULATION!! No one will be able to agree on anything as politicians bounce between big donors bitching and various voter poll data.

Somewhere out in left field are the right things that need to be done.

1. The same thing could've been said about the Covid-19 pandemic back in February 2020. In fact, a certain American President said as much. The fact that people are incapable of envisioning major disruptions to their lives does not prove that scientists are wrong; it's proves that humans can be blindsided by their own biases.

2. Countries don't plan their economies half a century ahead. Most struggle to plan beyond the next election cycle.

I have was a denier of: CO2 emitted by humans causes global warming until I studied chemistry. Then it hit me. The earth is warming, we are making it warm faster. This place is normally hot...we are making it worse.

The claims sound fantastic if you don't have a solid education. The people you are trying to convince do not have an education that will allow them to understand for themselves. They fundamentally distrust the people trying to convince them. There is no "to be believed." That has already reached the saturation point.

In democratic countries, the answer to the question of "do we want a little pain before the elections or a lot of pain down the road?" is quite clear - if you accept the pain now, you'll get voted out and get replaced by someone who will proclaim that the pain isn't needed, promise to undo your measures and kick the problem even further down the road to some other future government.

> Your mistake is weighing superstition vs tangible harm.

Care to share which of the thousands of peer-reviewed papers on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's website, you have:

a) read

b) understood

c) found errors in

d) brought to the world's attention?

500, 10, 1, ? I thought not.

And yes, of course it sucks - no one wants this. You seem to think the unpleasantness of the diagnosis and remedy gives you and yours an out.

https://www.ipcc.ch/

> You seem to think the unpleasantness of the diagnosis and remedy gives you and yours an out.

This is such an interesting observation. I had always thought that with a dire enough problem, humanity would band together and come up with a solution at all cost.

But after observing the worldwide response to the pandemic, I’m quite sure the world will become engulfed in wildfire and famine while a notable fraction of the population continues to insist that “this is normal and everything is fine”.

It’s an odd situation where magical thinking (“it can’t happen to me”) negates self-preservation.

The IPCC has been making dire predictions now for 3 decades. Can you point to any that came true?

Off the top of my head I know that

1. Glacier park was to vanish by 2020. Its still there, barely changed, some glaciers shrank, others grew.

2. Sea level didn't rise as expected.

3 Polar bears are strong, and are not on the endangered list.

4. Temperatures did not rise as much as expected. We are still way below the Roman and Bronze age warm periods.

5. Damage from weather has increased in America, but that is a result of a policy to rebuild, instead of abandoning areas prone to bad weather. Increasing the probability of being damaged by bad weather. Actual weather severity has not changed much.

6. In school, I was made to feel terrified of desertification. The opposite happened, the deserts retreated. The globe is greening.

As I said, that is off the top of my head, but it can all be backed up by data. Or prove me wrong. Can you show me a few ipcc predictions which actually came true? Thanks.

The IPCC does not make predictions. Never has, never will. The whole point, which real climate scientists repeat as nauseum, is we can never know absolutes because of the huge number of variables and timeframes. So what they do instead is provide scenarios. And each scenario has a series of weightings or probabilities. The summaries spell these out in rough terms, the full reports go into intricate detail and sources. If you spend the time to read the summaries you will find a good number of scenarios which are currently playing out as we speak.

Thousands of researchers making predictions with ever shifting probabilities is what you call unfalsifiable.

The predictions we’re talking about play out over decades. The sources cite other predictions. It’s a feedback loop of assumptions and peer review from people who you know already share the same assumptions.

Climate science is much more akin to sociology than a hard science.

Except climate science has tons and tons of hard data that the models need to agree with to be publishable, whereas sociology has questionnaires administered to a group of 20 sociology students.

Making a model that agrees with historical data is literally the base case for modeling. Like it is a feature of all forecasting solutions

The settled science used to be that leeches were a valid cure for a ton of medical issues. Lots of peer reviewed research on it at the time, I’m sure.

> The idea that we should eliminate fossil fuels is truly a privileged take.

It is, and it's our only option. It's the reason nobody is doing a lot to combat climate change: because it'll require a lot of tears, effort and money, and nobody wants or can afford to spend them.

At the end, it's always the poor that have to pay. It's always been like that. Doesn't make climate change any less real.

Climate change is indeed a justice problem and we should optimize for justice rather than just raw temperature management. There are "solutions" that cause more injustice by denying efficient energy to the global poor.

But the wealthy people who make this argument tend to argue for total inaction rather than a justice-focused approach where they sacrifice greatly in order to permit the global poor to have access to efficient energy for as long as possible.

It's difficult to believe the working class in America should bear the sacrifice when the richest people in the world just flew their private jets to a lavish climate conference thousands of miles from home to discuss how much the working class should sacrifice.

Any sacrifice that is called for should start at the top.

Cool. I think you'll find that a large number of climate activists are very on board with pretty extreme policies pulling from the rich. The people calling it "superstition" tend to be people who don't support high taxes on the wealthy.

That may be true at the grassroots level, but I've never seen it materialize at the policy level.

Perhaps I've missed something. Could you cite an example of an actual (not merely theoretical) climate policy that pulls from the rich without hurting the working class?

I mean, there is barely any climate policy at all in the first place.

The working class in America is part of the richest people in the world.

How many of them have a private jet? Your working class American might make 5 times as much as a person living in the third world, but the clowns at this climate conference are easily 1,000 times as rich. Your comparison is meaningless.

The actions of a few thousand extremely rich people have little influence on global emissions. The actions of 300 million Americans do.

Anyone could use that excuse: "I'm just one person, it doesn't matter what I do."

It's even less credible when the one person is putting 10x as much carbon in the atmosphere as the average person.

And until the rich start making personal sacrifices, they lack any moral authority to demand sacrifices from others.

So because removing fossil fuels will be difficult to do, we shouldn't try and we should instead bury our head in the sand about the very real problems that lay ahead of us?

Yes, this is precisely why we should have phased these out in the first world (and required the same of our business partners in the second world) decades ago. The longer we wait, the worse it will be. It’s like credit card debt—if you stop depending on it, you’ll have a little less money in the short term, but you need to or you’ll have much less money in the long term.