
Apocalyptic Claims About Climate Change Are Wrong - swsieber
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/11/25/why-everything-they-say-about-climate-change-is-wrong/
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ncmncm
There is a lot of money to be made going around reassuring people that the
greatest existential threat of our time is no big deal.

When the hundreds of millions of refugees flood across borders driving
governments to fascism, and those fascist governments do what they do and
trigger global thermonuclear war, these same individuals will insist none of
it was their, or the fascists', fault. If money still means anything they will
be well-paid for that, too.

~~~
setr
When you start going down the road of affected things, and then affected-
affected things, and then affected-affected-affected things, you leave your
case more vulnerable to alternative explanations (and thus solutions) with
each step along the way.

Climate change -> population migration -> fascism -> nuclear war is quite a
severe set of steps, and if this is truly the scenario we're worried about,
then climate change is probably the most difficult step to correct. We'd
likely have a much easier time trying to control migration or fascism or
nuclear war. And there's a decent chance something will naturally interfere
with these set of steps such that it doesn't occur.

Additionally, it seems to me that nuclear war can derive from a number of
different sequences, and climate change is probably not the most immediate
one.

~~~
ncmncm
I.e., nothing causes anything, doing anything has no effect. The song is old.

~~~
setr
Or rather, history is not a simple straight line for you to trace out and
predict as your political needs require.

We can play the same game with other sequences as well, and its still not that
convincing

Video games -> de-sympathizing -> murderers -> high crime rate

Poor -> Uneducated -> Republican -> Trump

religious -> muslim -> jihadi

religious -> anti-science -> ludite -> Unabomber(s)

DnD -> Anti-Christian -> Anti-good -> satanists

Just because you drew a path doesn't make it convincing.

I.e., Something could cause something, which could cause other things, so they
definitely do cause it, so stopping something stops everything. The song is
old.

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thorwasdfasdf
From the article: "First, no credible scientific body has ever said climate
change threatens the collapse of civilization much less the extinction of the
human species."

They say millions in the US will be displaced due to climate change in the
coming decades. And yet, here we are in CA already displacing millions just
from this self inflicted housing crisis.

~~~
blacksmith_tb
That's a leitmotif in the article, and I think it's a good cautionary note. We
need to tackle climate change, but we can't stop work on other problems,
mistakenly thinking they'll be solved automatically by fixing climate change.

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bsaul
It’s about time people start being more sensible on this topic. This was
becoming bordeline stupid, with pretty much everything « caused by climate
change ». i wonder what the next victim of media insanity will be..

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marmadukester39
The tipping points are real, cataclysmic and not mentioned here. Read about
the clathrate gun and the methane coming out of the tundra, never mind the
huge fires in the boreal forests this year. The IPCC estimates are famously
conservative and the trend figures all indicate the most aggressive scenarios
or worse are likely. Anyone who suggests the world will end in 20 years is
wrong, but the impacts will be massive on longer timescales. Minimizing the
risks in this way is so deeply frightening.

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ZeroGravitas
This Shellenberg guy has a really weird schtick. I can't figure out if he's
just insane or a member of some strange cult.

A few juxtapositions of this current column against his previous columns:

He doesn't want people to say that climate change will make Koalas extinct,
but he himself thinks wind turbines will make several species extinct.

He thinks it makes sense to burn coal in India because it's cheap, but he
attacks renewables, which are cheaper than running existing coal in some
regions, because they will "lock in" fossil fuel usage which is apparently a
bad thing when they do it.

He relies on the IPCC as the last word on whether climate change will have
catastrophic impacts, but also rails against it for it's anti-nuclear bias.
Are we allowed to question the IPCC or not?

He wants everyone to be reasonable and sensible but think most
environmentalist are csecret communists who want to intionally made people
poorer?

~~~
mcswell
Apart from your final sentence, which is just weird, I don't see these as
contradictions. Seldom does anyone agree 100% with someone else
(mathematicians might be an exception), so one could reasonably consider the
IPCC to be reliable on some issues and not on others. But that's probably not
even what's' happening; the author might (for all I know) think the IPCC is
too far on the side of exaggerating the climate change problem (and ignoring
the nuclear solution), but still use them as evidence that the climate feature
is not as bad as some claim. And the idea that coal is a good idea in India (a
relatively impoverished country) and bad in "some regions" (presumably wealthy
countries, you don't say) seems entire non-contradictory to me.

"Insane" or "strange cult"\--oh, stuff and nonsense. You need to come back to
reality.

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swsieber
I withs the title was better, but I wasn't sure what to change it to.

It's mostly just debunking hyperbole around climate change.

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ecoled_ame
but still ... i would rather live in a world with less pollution ...

