If climate change is not a thing or not man-made, the worst outcome would be missing a few percentage points of economic growth by unnecessarily restricting energy sources.
If climate change is a thing and it is man-made, the worst outcome would be everything that is described by the IPCC, which is bad for society as a whole.
So, just pondering the worst-case scenario is enough to give you an idea of a sensible course of action.
> If climate change is not a thing or not man-made, the worst outcome would be missing a few percentage points of economic growth by unnecessarily restricting energy sources.
Don't forget about the benefits to average healthspan from not breathing in exhaust/coal fumes. And the unknown benefits from opening up a new technological frontier that has previously been closed off due to the high energy density of fossil fuels.
You can put it as a variant of the Pascal wager. If it is right, mankind may go through hellish conditions for decades and centuries, till extinction. If it is wrong we will have tl go through something like the lockdowns because the Covid pandemic.
Of course, that if you know nothing and believe in no one, so you don't have a clue of what future may come. We advanced a bit since astrology and reading tea leaves, we have better tools to make predictions, and they work well enough to base our current civilization on that, and, don't know, be afraid because taking a plane, entering a skyscraper, or taking a medicine. And those tools are the ones saying which alternative is the right one there.
> the worst outcome would be missing a few percentage points of economic growth by unnecessarily restricting energy sources.
I suppose the real reason we're not tackling it full on is that it won't be a few percentage points.
Let's face it, the cost of abruptly stopping fossil fuel dependence would be high. Countries going bankrupt, people dying due to high fuel costs, enormous investments diverting money from other necessities.
It may well be necessary, and better than the alternative! But we tried the "just cycle a little bit more" approach and it made next to no dent to CO2 emissions. To really tackle it, we'd need to reinvent the global economy.
> If climate change is not a thing or not man-made, the worst outcome would be missing a few percentage points of economic growth by unnecessarily restricting energy sources.
A “few” percentage points of growth means misery for many.
"A few percentage points of economic growth" makes it sound so trivial. When what you're really saying is you want to keep billions of poor people around the world away from the chance at a better life.
What I do know is that Nigeria was recently forced to cut their fuel subsidy, and I highly suspect that was done under indirect pressure from western environmentalists. Which would be a very concrete example of making a couple hundred million very poor people even worse off.
Fair point. But the deeper problem was most of that money never trickled down to its own citizens, built infrastructure or got reinvested in the country. Someone else, not the people, became "owners", making foreign agents the policy-makers.
Just pointing out that the deeper issues often gets lost in the geopolitics. When it progressively makes people's lives worse or exponentially increases debts, it really all leads to the same outcomes in the end.
There is a third possibility: climate change is a thing and it’s NOT Man made. This is the true worst case senario. We both hurt the global economy (especially of developing world) in a futile attempt to stop it while still having to deal with the effects.
To be clear, I do believe in anthropomorphic climate change, but in a vacuum the situation is not as “sensible” as you say.
it would change the methods we have to use. cutting carbon emissions wouldn't do anything substantial if it's not man made. in that case I think we'd need to use geoengineering to avoid it.
> If climate change is not a thing or not man-made, the worst outcome would be missing a few percentage points of economic growth by unnecessarily restricting energy sources.
This is a bit reductive of what is happening. How about the psychological damage done by the fear mongering caused by these type of news regarding climate change?
If you removed news about climate change, the climate of fear mongering in the news would not change much, it’d just refocus on the typical, and I think the psychological damage you’re referring to would continue nearly unabated.
It’s a product of the information environment, not the information itself.
And in light of the magnitude of the risk of getting this wrong, future generations will benefit in either case - either because we did what we could to improve things, or because we were the unfortunate generation that got lucky enough to be the ones having to interpret the data and suffer through some anxiety so the next generation doesn’t have to.
Imagine two future headlines:
“21st century scientists were on the right track, but society failed to act in time due to a drastic pullback in climate related reporting caused by worry that such reporting was too upsetting for people to handle. 6B perished in the aftermath due to mass starvation and forced migration.”
“21st century scientists had the unfortunate job of coming face to face with apparently cataclysmic data, without enough information about earth’s long term cycles to know that this was inevitable”.
Bottom line: the cost of incorrectly taking no action is so much higher than taking unnecessary action that it seems preferable to find ways to manage the downsides of acting than to hope there are no downsides of not acting.
What about the physical and psychological damage if the scientists are right and things get really really really really bad? If the ocean levels really do rise 10+ meters, won’t that cause even worse psychological damage? If places like the Middle East really do become uninhabitable, won’t that cause even worse psychological damage? Millions of refugees. If the vast majority of sea life dies, won’t that cause psychological damage? What about the Atlantic current stopping and the effects that would have on Europe? What about the increased drought and crop failure? What about invasive species moving farther North? More animals going extinct? Etc. It seems to me that the psychological damage from any and all of those will be far worse that what you are worried about.
If somebody calls out the problem and then we all agree on an attempted solution why is there some major psychological damage to the general population as a result of that? Just because something might be scary we shouldn't talk about it?
You're not concerned about how having such a large percentage of population becoming basically useless due to psychological problems can trouble the future of mankind?
You're not concerned about how having such a large percentage of population becoming basically useless due to psychological problems can trouble the future of mankind?
I have not seen any evidence of a "large percentage of the population becoming useless" due to fear of climate change.
Can you provide a citation?
I have seen people with a basic background concern about climate change, and some people have more of it than others, but I don't see a "large percentage" of people becoming useless.
People have lots of fears. Some even more more pressing than climate change. Human beings are able to handle and process many different fears of varying intensities simultaneously, and have for thousands of years.
I have also not seen any information that the psychological fear of climate change is worse than actual climate change. One provokes level of fear in a subset of the population. The other will kill us all.
Perhaps the best way to fix those psychological fears in people is to fix the climate so they don't have to worry about it?
> If climate change is not a thing or not man-made, the worst outcome would be missing a few percentage points of economic growth by unnecessarily restricting energy sources.
It’s easy to be blithe about a few percentage points coming out of your bonus if you already live comfortably in the first world, but a few percentage points of economic growth is life or death for millions of people.
Considering how much money is being invested into the solutions, I would say that the change from fossil fuels will be great for economies and geopolitics. Specially since by going renewable/nuclear most countries are reducing dependence on crazy countries and may end up spending way less money on energy.
Those are all good reasons to support green energy (and I do), but I was responding to the patent poster’s worst-case scenario, which would in fact be bad, not just inconvenient.
That is an excellent question to ask.
If climate change is not a thing or not man-made, the worst outcome would be missing a few percentage points of economic growth by unnecessarily restricting energy sources.
If climate change is a thing and it is man-made, the worst outcome would be everything that is described by the IPCC, which is bad for society as a whole.
So, just pondering the worst-case scenario is enough to give you an idea of a sensible course of action.