The same thing that's continued to happen: We adapt and create solutions.

People have been screaming "everyone will die!!!" via religious based prophecies for... all of human history. The Cult Of Climate Change is no different: a little bit of truth and a lot of faith in Revelations and the unavoidable apocalypse.

Prophecies like "all the icecaps will be gone by 2020" and "billions will die from starvation" (hint: those forecasts failed)

https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/18-spectacularly-wrong-apocal...

This is no different than the people who follow the pastor that's wrong about the date of Jesus' second coming. every year he looks at the numbers and says "next year, on x date". That date comes. and goes. and the faithful see the failed prophecy and he goes "oh look... I was wrong... it's really next year on y date". The faithful see this each year and their faith grows stronger as each failed prophecy means the next one MUST be true.

What do we think will happen? More failed prophecies. The Church of Climate Doom faithful becomes more convinced that theirs is the One True Faith as each prediction continues to prove them right.

The problem with your argument is comparing climate science to religion. There -is- actual science to support the climate doomers. You can cherry pick headlines all you want, but the models have actually been pretty decent so far. Even a little too conservative.

But it's a political problem in the end, anyway, not a science one.

> There -is- actual science to support the climate doomers.

No, there are only people taking the worse estimates and using them to support the doom hypothesis.

That's why we call them doomsters.

They are the same people that in the past supported the idea that the World would end on the year 1,000. It was a tiny minority of doomsters, largely over represented in legends and myths. The majority of people did not believe that, just like today only few small groups believe it will actually happen this time.

No scientist has ever claimed that we are facing an existential crisis that could end up with the extinction of the human race.

"there is actual science"

There is SOME truth. but not all of it.

Just like there is truth in religions - be nice to your neighbors. Do unto others. Truth. surrounded by bullshit (religion, dogma, etc).

There is truth and "actual science"... but there's also half truths, lies, bad prophecies, etc.

"you can cherry pick" likewise, you can cherry pick some facts about carbon... and then ignore stuff like the destruction required to make batteries, the inability to recycle a MASSIVE fuckton of "green" (wind mill blades, batteries, solar panels, etc - all ending up in land fills).

"models" yeah... except that models are limited, have increasing error rates and you end up with the spaghetti modeling with the simple stuff like weather for next week - much less the weather for next year.

Speaking of cherry picking... you'll cherry pick one or two models from a decade ago and ignore the 100+ others that are wrong.

"political not science" it's both. and religious. It's faith in models that have been cherry picked while ignoring inconvenient truths about "green" solutions that are based on bad models that can't be proven and that don't cover all the possibilities.

the problem with your response is your apparent faith in science and, like a Catholic who will downplay problems with priests, you'll ignore the parts you are uncomfortable with.

climate change is real (little c, little c). Has been happening for... all of history.

Climate Change is not (big C, big C). It is a religion.

One is based on facts and science. the other is based on faith.

Thanos is that you?

Wanting to kill people now, to hopefully save the environment in the future.

You have to consider how many people will die in the future from climate change

This sort of extremist desperation plants the seeds for justifying horrific, subhuman destruction. There are no limits. This is beyond dangerous, it’s foolish and cancerous.

Indeed, we need real order of magnitude numbers here of deaths from energy scarcity vs deaths from future climate change. Otherwise we're just blowing hot air around.

The environment will be fine. They want to kill people now in order to hopefully save people from dying in the future.

How this is not a parody is beyond me.

Maybe the novel coronavirus was meant to be exactly that. Or at least a trial run.

> They want to kill people now

this is drastically wrong and dangerous rhetoric

Why do you think people have to die? Keep the strictly necessary things, get rid of the superfluous. Doesn't seem too difficult to me.

Good luck figuring out which is which from the legislative armchair.

I recommend the book Seeing Like A State.

Ok, but you still have to try because we all agree the alternative is worse right?

I didn't mean to say that it's easy, just that it's simple. Simple things can still be hard to accomplish.

Strong “dropbox could be done in a weekend with rsync” vibes.

Also “If You Can Keep Your Head When Everybody Round You Is Losing His, Then It Is Very Probable That You Don’t Understand the Situation”

I never said it will be easy, but it still needs to be done.

Dropbox wasn't built in a weekend, but it was built.

> What do you think will happen if the temperatures keep rising, the oceans keep rising, and currently livable areas of land that hold billions of people become inhabitable?

It’s really not so bad. Not compared to killing millions of people today by increasing the price of energy. Estimates are of a rise of [2-4 degrees centigrade by 2100.](https://dnr.wisconsin.gov/climatechange/science#:~:text=Glob....) This will likely result in an [increase](https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/6/1/014....) of arable land. [As the number of storms are estimated to decrease, the threat vector is slightly increasing storm intensity.](https://climate.nasa.gov/news/3184/a-force-of-nature-hurrica....) Humans can handle storms. We can rebuild homes, change where we settle and live, build with better materials and practises, and improve storm infrastructure and protections.

[Approximately 600,000 people die each year from extreme heat, while 4.5 million die from extreme cold.](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5...) Let's ignore the ratio for now, because there are second and third order consequences beyond extreme heat like famine to account for. 4.5 million people die each year because of inadequate access to cheaper energy. This is of course linear. Every time energy prices go up, so too do the number of people dying. That is the direct cost of the war on oil, coal, and natural gas, and there are many indirect costs (and lives) which go far beyond this. The intention of climate activists is to make fossil fuels much more expensive, meaning many more deaths.

Of course, maybe the goal here is worth killing 4.5+++ million people per year. There are no perfect solutions; only compromises. Maybe many more will die if we don't act. [The IPCC estimates that an additional 250,000 people per year, between 2030 and 2050, will die from the effects of climate change.](https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/climate-cha...) That covers all modes of death, such as famine. For those in the room doing the math, many times more people will die today by making energy more expensive. Activists are asking us to sacrifice millions of lives per year today to save an estimated 250,000 lives per year decades from now.

For this reason, I no longer support making energy more expensive. I support environmental efforts to reduce pollution, but I can no longer justify the high cost of human life associated with taxes on energy. Instead, I really think activists should focus on making energy cheaper. This means working on solutions to make renewable energy and nuclear cheaper per unit of energy than fossil fuels. That's a path to saving lives which I think most people can get on board with.

Rare to see an effortful post so full of citations! Bravo for raising the standard of debate, even if your conclusion is disagreeable!

>This will likely result in an [increase](https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/6/1/014....) of arable land.

This is my point. We already have major immigration/refugee issues all over the world. Even if we are 100% certain climate change will result in more farm land for humanity, the issue is where are the people now and where will that farm land be then? Do you think Russia (or any other country) will be happy to take in a billion people from South-East Asia? Legal immigration is an issue now. This will be a humanitarian catastrophe larger than any war humanity has ever faced by orders of magnitude.

do you think Russians will gladly accept a crash of their economy instead?

with no guarantees that it would solve anything?

> This will be a humanitarian catastrophe larger than any war humanity has ever faced by orders of magnitude.

We have literally survived a shrink of 99% of our total population as humans, you are grossly overestimating the effects of what's currently happening.

Famine in Africa is an existential risk with or without global warming. Currently 822 million people are estimated to be malnourished. As per the citations above, global warming will provide only a slightly elevated risk of famine relative to present day.

Overpopulation in Africa is a problem to be solved either way. Ameliorating global warming won’t make any meaningful improvement to that.

I genuinely don't understand how your comment is a response to mine. Where are we going to move the billions of people living in coastal South East Asia when oceans rise and their land becomes un-farmable due to climate change?

Rising oceans aren’t going to make coastal areas in Asia uninhabitable for any appreciable proportion of people for centuries. Asia has huge tracts of unused land. Over the centuries, people will migrate.

I tried to explain to you that overpopulation has almost nothing to do with global warming, and conflating the two diminishes our ability to solve each.

You scenario seems to only correlate increasing price with lower consumption.

I think there should also be viable paths where increased prices for some energy forms translates to increased demand for cleaner forms instead

A carbon tax matched by a matching carbon dividend could transfer funds to poor people.

A fuel consumption tax can be matched by a matching tax cut on miles driven. Transferring demand from fossil fuel to other transportation means.

There may be loads of pitfalls in those two example of course, they are mostly meant to illustrate the point.

The goal is to make energy cheaper. I would much prefer it to be clean energy, but this is secondary. If we could devise a way to make clean energy cheaper than untaxed fossil fuels, I’m all in. It just hasn’t worked that way so far, and activists are almost entirely focused on making fossil fuels more expensive, rather than clean energy cheaper.