Posted by paulpauper 11/5/2025
After 25 years of dire, ‘existential’ warnings, the political messaging is beginning to taper off and moderate.
It’s a necessary step. If you tell people the worlds about to end for too long, you lose credibility with all but the true believers.
Apologies are due to everyone that was fried on social media for suggesting things were not as bad as described. Anyone not fully radicalized was declared a ‘denier’ and accused of being ignorant about the overwhelming science.
It seems the people who acknowledged the climate was changing, but did not consider it an immediate, existential threat now have the high scientific ground. It seems possible they’ll keep it.
Holocene extinction - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction
You all call yourself pragmatist but us doomers actually seem to be the only ones who want any of humanity to survive at all ....
Experts have not been suggesting that a catastrophe will wipe humans from the planet within the next handful of years. They have been suggesting that our trends are deeply unsustainable for the planet. And the effects of screwing with our planet will easily be catastrophic in many years if trends continue.
So yes, urgent action would be necessary to get the trends to be more manageable. But because monkey brain doesn’t see an immediate threat, monkey brain calls climate scientists liars for some reason. We have these “temperature targets” not because the world instantly ends once we hit however many degrees of warming, but because we know the impact of that much change will be more drastic over the following decades. Monkeybrain just doesn’t know how to prioritize that threat without making people afraid of it.
I'm ~50, and my whole life, back to the 80's, there have been these sort of breathless extreme articles about the existential threat that climate poses. I remember, as a kid, it was global cooling, and we were all going to have to deal with an ice age, which terrified me.
Then it was global warming, and the "tipping point" and hawaii and all of our coastal cities were going to be under water within 5 years.
Then it was "climate change" which was poorly defined to me, but humans were definitely to blame, and causing hurricanes and destroying the planet - even though when I bothered to look at the actual data, the rate of hurricanes and other events had actually decreased.
I've read some super compelling articles from what I'll call "measured environmentalists" that argue persuasively that to do the most good for people, we should shift our focus to immediate harms that we can actually control well - things like malaria, and reliable clean water and heating, that would have a far greater impact for tens of millions of people than something nebulous like carbon credits.
I'm far from an expert on this stuff, I just wish that the conversation (as with so many things) could have less yelling, and more considered thoughtful discussion. This article, and Gates' seem to be a great start.
This is the kind of stuff one should take in from one ear, and let it out through the other ear without letting it touch the brain.
[1] complexity in the sense of mathematics.
That makes it at least as valuable to me as any given "we're all going to die" article that pops up endlessly in these kinds of discussions.
I agree though, that a big problem with these conversations is dealing with complex systems, small signals and potentially large impacts and communicating all that in an effective way.
Most people (myself included) are simply not equipped to understand the details, so we rely on others to explain it to us.
My point was just that I enjoy a more balanced take on the issue.
In a well-established field like Physics or Biology, if an expert is talking about the established part of their field, they can just say things and you can trust that they are correct. If they saying things about the unestablished parts of their field - say a physicist talking about string theory - they need to properly cite stuff.
In a not so well established field like Climate Science, where there is a lot of disagreement, every expert needs to cite their sources so people in adjacent fields can verify what they are saying.
Is there? In the actual science, not in the I'm-a-contrarian-because-fossil-pays-well scene.
But the climate denialists like the author don't talk about that. They attack settled science and handwave away legitimate, serious concerns by saying that risk is incalculable.
"To know, and not yet to do, is not to know" - Aristotle.
Everyone still flies on planes. Ceasing burning kerosene is the easiest possible thing you could do to reduce your climate impact, but no-one does it.
Everyone hates being called out on it, but it is true. No-one really cares, because no-one is prepared to make a socially costly signal, costly in prestige or relationships or group membership. It's all posturing.