alt Hacker NewsI think climate change is a compelling crisis but I find these types of “could maybe happen according to some models” type of catastrophic scenarios a little frustrating because they soak up a lot of attention with scary headlines, reinforcing hopelessness in those who care while providing ammunition to skeptics when the catastrophe doesn’t materialize.
It’s also easy to question methodology for anyone who has done academic modeling and knows how easy it is to get the result you want. Much harder to argue against the basic first principle that injecting trillions of barrels of oil into the atmosphere is literal geoengineering and it’s gonna have consequences.
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The risk was 5% and is now above 50% according to experts in the field.
Given the significant consequences this is worth paying attention to.
In the past, these climate models were mostly on the conservative side. So I would stop questioning them and ask for more actions to take toward implementing existing climate solutions.
What, exactly, do you expect scientists researching these things to do? Bury their findings?
Except the catastrophes are materializing now so those fools are increasingly wrong.
The solar panel install stats give me hope. It’s unfortunate the US is burying its head on new alt energy projects but our grifting culture is just too strong.
Agreed. This kind of provocative story gives many people the sense that science is unreliable, full of shifting narratives and unmet prophesies. That undermines the confidence we need in it as a society.
I would argue the opposite. The number one frustration I have with climate change is the continued and persistent inaction by our world leaders. I would argue that modeling out worst case scenarios is more likely to reach our leaders and finally break this decades long inaction.
I think generally the effects climate skeptics have over climate policy is overstated. And corporations with vested interest in being able to continue releasing massive amounts of CO2 into our atmosphere have much more say over climate policy then climate skeptics. Now these companies often do weaponize climate skeptics in order to lobby government into continued inaction, but that behavior will continue regardless of how scientists frame their climate models.
> providing ammunition to skeptics when the catastrophe doesn’t materialize.
This would be compeling if they were actual sceptics who care about evidence. We are talking about people who will bad faith deny everything.
Censoring yourself is exactly what they wanted to achieve and did achieved.
So many of those 'could maybe happen' are, in fact, happening right now. The researcher is also quoted as saying 'more likely than not' which is pretty big when it comes to something like the AMOC shutting down. This really is catastrophic and really should be causing governments to take immediate, massive, steps to avert it including steps to sanction countries that are causing it.