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Preliminary but important point: what you call prevention is typically called 'mitigation' by the UNFCCC, NASA, and other environmental orgs, while what you have called mitigation is typically 'adaptation' [1]. I know this is jargon, but if you have conversations with folks in the environmental/climate field it can in the best case provide instant rapport to at least be speaking the same language, and in the worst case, at least prevent serious mis-understandings.

>>The other thing is that people don't really think this is a true emergency. An evidence for this is the quote "What if global warming is wrong and we made the planet better?" If it is a true emergency, we should be doing stuff that make the planet worse if it is wrong. We should be pushing nuclear power - even to the the point of reducing existing safety regulations. A Chernobyl every decade is preferable to global warming. Politically, we should be willing to trade existing environmental regulation for those which reduce CO2.

-Human perception of danger/emergency has, from the evolutionary perspective, been optimized for concrete, near-term events/entities, eg terrorism, explosions, enemies. On the other hand ,it has not prepared us for preparing against abstract, medium to long term adversaries, eg planetary or physics scale changes that threaten civilization, malevolent ETs, malevolent super-intelligences [AIs].. etc etc.

-Even if this weren't true and we didn't have these unfortunate cognitive bias, your argument about broad public wisdom of emergency relies upon a well-informed populace that is familiar with statistics, and the scientific methods. Unfortunately, that is not the case in almost every advanced Representative state on the planet. This broad ignorance renders the ambient public awarness point you have made quite moot.

-Finally, I see the logic behind the 'what if global warming is wrong and the planet gets better' case as analogical to Pascal's wager, or the false postive; what you forgot to mention is the false negative, which is metaphorically relatively similar to the outcome of Pascals (Hell/Earth becomes like Hell).

[1] https://climate.nasa.gov/solutions/adaptation-mitigation/

The Climate Leadership Council is an organization of Republican Party elders with an extremely solid proposal to immediately reduce carbon emissions through a carbon fee, which is a market-based mechanism to reflect the true cost of carbon at the source.

Link to proposal: https://www.clcouncil.org/our-plan/ Link to TED talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/ted_halstead_a_climate_solution_wh...

I would have applauded this...a decade ago. The proposal itself is a fine thing, but heralding it as 'the right strategy for our political moment' (1) is asinine.

~1/3 of the population has bought into the idea that climate change is a hoax, and that Tea Party conservative demographic has essentially wrested control of the Republican party from the well-intentioned paternalists that used to run it. Appeals to rationality and institutional consensus are unlikely to be effective when you have a large demographic that has lost trust not just in the media but in the notion of the university (2).

While the authors of the proposal are entirely right about both the current political conditions and necessity of bold action, they are no facing an intractable political problem: generating the political capital required to make this a reality demands large-scale public buy-in, most of which will naturally come from the more liberal side of the political spectrum. But the more they do so, the more intense the opposition will be, and this is a made-to-order target for the right: taxes go up! on gas and oil, the previous bodily fluids of the our psychic economy! at the behest of global elites! You can hear the cries of 'Agenda 21!!!' already.

This is a reconstructive policy, and that's great, but it is going nowhere until our existing political crisis is resolved, which is probably 5 years at a minimum.

1. https://www.clcouncil.org/the-right-strategy-for-our-politic...

2. http://www.people-press.org/2017/07/10/sharp-partisan-divisi...

So what, if not this, is the right strategy for our political moment?

Force the constitutional convention that the right is advocating for ahead of their schedule and encourage peaceful mass assembly for the airing of various grievances. Institutional consensus has evaporated and the US is in dire need of an administrative and political reboot, so the choices are between doing that in an orderly way through the existing constitutional mechanism or waiting for it to just happen, which will be a lot messier.

Right wing political strategists have sought an article V convention for years, ostensibly to introduce a balanced budget amendment but in all likelihood with other strategic considerations in mind. The liberal left abhors the idea, both because of (wholly legitimate) suspicion at the origin and motivations of the proponents and (less creditably) because of basic conflict/risk aversion.

The right's national electoral strategy is to maintain power through the 2018 midterms (expanding it in a midterm election is historically rare) and control enough state legislatures by 2020 to trigger the convention, at which point all bets are off. I judge that they have a moderately good chance of succeeding with this strategy, not least because of superior political skills at procedural manipulation, but largely because of a smaller and more homogenous winning coalition.

Democrats and the left in general have been resisting this pull, but have lost the strategic initiative. They should, therefore, reverse course and seek to accelerate the process as rapidly as possible - because once the Convention is underway, procedural norms go out the window and power politics take their place. Employing the right's political momentum against them, within the scope of the existing constitutional framework, is by far the best strategic option. The alternative is at least a decade of political trench warfare, civil unrest, and international and institutional drift which could result in a catastrophic decline.

Not disagreeing with the ineffectiveness of abstinence on unwanted pregnancy, I just would like to point out that I don't think the Catholic church was trying (directly) to address extra-marital pregnancy. Their primary/direct goal was to prevent extra-marital sex - which their teachings do seem to affect. Your comment could be read as a criticism that the "Catholic leaders were dumb - can't they see that birth control education is more effective?" - which is a wrong line of thinking because that is not the issue that the Catholic leaders were trying to address.

Yeah the Catholic Church has never been against pregnancy...

I strongly support nuclear power, and although I kind of understand their points of view, I can't stop thinking those opposing nuclear power is not serious about climate change.

>I can't stop thinking those opposing nuclear power is not serious about climate change.

They mostly are I think, they're just completely ignorant and naive and unrealistic about all the solutions. The strongly anti-nuclear people (esp. those a decade ago and longer) seem to really think that everyone's going to suddenly stop driving cars and start walking and biking everywhere.

However, that said, it's getting more and more realistic to forgo nuclear power while still reducing greenhouse gas emissions, thanks to renewables, especially solar power. PV power is getting cheaper all the time, and Germany for instance produces a large fraction of their power with it despite Germany not being an especially sunny country. So it's getting more and more realistic to oppose nuclear power while still supporting policies to reduce climate change, and not be completely naive and ignorant as in the past. The main problem with solar is storage, due to its transient generation nature.

Long time nuclear opponents advocating renewables were right in hindsight: If all the post WWII nuclear R&D resources had been spent on renewables instead of military derived reactor designs, we would have had cost effective renewables for years now.

Instead, nuclear is still not commercially competitive, having swallowed globally untold amounts of tax money away from other research.

The latest gen reactor projects are very pyrrhic victories for nonfossil energy.

They are ignorant, but nuclear power proponents have most done a terrible job of selling their argument. They keep selling the benefits while downplaying the safety concerns. The correct strategy is to treat the safety concerns as being of primary importance and treat the benefits as an unfortunate necessity.

It does not matter what the actual risk incidence and hazards are. You do not overcome bias by talking people into submission to the evidence. that works great in peer view and in school but it does not work in the real world because the population you need to convince does not have sufficient spare intellectual capacity to process that.

If you want to sell nuclear power you offer reactor designs that are new, you over-engineer for safety, you say you're taking profit out of the equation, you fire anyone who makes even the smallest mistake, and you drink a glass of any wastewater (or equivalent depending on reactor design).

The public believes, with some reason, that anything nuclear either explodes or contaminates things. No amount of reasoned argument is going to change this perception. The way to change it is to make the plants look different and have the operators and sponsors of the plants live next to the nuclear plant with their families. Not say that it's perfectly safe, show that it's perfectly safe.

I am not against nuclear, just want to point out that while this might have been true in the past, the price decline in solar means nuclear now looses on price. (Perhaps as stable base load where hydro is not already in place...but energy storage might be cheaper than nuclear too)

> Trying to scare people into behavior does not work very well. The Catholic Church spent centuries threatening people with eternal hell if they had extra-marital sex, and people still had extra-marital sex. Studies have shown that abstinence only sex education results in more teen pregnancies. Thomas Malthus saw an impending famine and begged people to have fewer children. People did not listen.

How do you know it didn't work, unless you think the only way it could be evaluated as having "worked" is if there were zero extra-marital sex and children born out of wedlock? My sense is that this was at least partially effective in discouraging the behaviors you describe.

> What works is "magic science." A solution that allows people to behave the way hey do, and we come up with a solution that just works. Birth control has resulted in a decline in teen pregnancies and population stabilization where it is available. The green revolution is able to feed people, without most people having to do anything different in how they eat.

We don't have the necessary magical science. We cannot continue behaving the way we are and expect to reach a point where we can realistically develop it, we will die or decline significantly as a species well before then. Yes, we can feed more people now, but a big part of what's driving climate change is emissions and other side effects from that. Our current behaviors are killing us.

> The other thing is that people don't really think this is a true emergency. An evidence for this is the quote "What if global warming is wrong and we made the planet better?" If it is a true emergency, we should be doing stuff that make the planet worse if it is wrong.

This is a non-sequitur. If you are injured or ill and taken to an emergency room, most effective treatments will not automatically make you worse if the diagnosis is incorrect. In some extreme cases this is true, but taking your line of reasoning would mean that only in such cases would the situation be considered an emergency. We have many, many tools available to us to slow the problem at least and allow ourselves additional time to prepare and react, the problem is that we are not doing them.

My sense is that we will not really be able to address this as a species until we hit some of the disaster points described in the article. When 50k+ people in the US die several summers in a row simply from heat (expect that within a decade), then perhaps we'll take it more seriously. Unfortunately, it might legitimately be too late at that point to even adjust quickly enough.

> The green revolution is able to feed people, without most people having to do anything different in how they eat.

I feel Norman Borlaug (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Borlaug) is worth mentioning. As Penn Jillette put it, he's probably saved billions of lives.

We need more Norman Borlaugs, and they need more recognition. This I believe because I agree with you: sure, we could still fix things, but we're not going to. So we better start coming up with ways to handle this. Think of it like creating a mail alias for someone who keeps misspelling an email address. It's a technological solution to a people problem that you can't fix (not easily), only on a much, much bigger scale. We hear people all the time here ask "how can I change the world through X?" or "what should I do with my life?" The answer is simple, but not easy: apply yourself to fixing this mess we've gotten ourself into, because if you don't, your children (or even you) will suffer the consequences.

Trying to scare people into behavior does not work very well.

What works is "magic science."

Are these the only two options? What about education, radical changes in awareness (and self-awareness), a move toward genuine sense of responsibility toward others as well as to the commons -- is all of that, off the table?

And what if "magic science" fails us this time? Or is that "unthinkable"?

Education takes a generation or two to work even for simple things, and what you're asking for is deep and fundamental. Surely you have noticed by now that a good quarter of the US population views all forms of public education with hostility. Think also how long it has taken for obviously sensible ideas to catch on, and then consider the much greater difficulty of inculcating abstract moral and political concepts.

Radical changes in awareness (and self-awareness) would be a fine thing, but frankly I think most people know about climate change already; some of them refuse to believe it, some of them would just prefer not to believe it, and some of them just don't care. The more public service announcements you make, the more they'll be denounced as satanic/communist/whatever propaganda.

Honestly, if you really want an outbreak of radical self-awareness, cross your fingers, hire every young organic chemist you can find, and start producing industrial quantities of LSD. That is not a facetious suggestion; psychedelics yield unpredictable but powerful changes in consciousness and can have a lasting impact on perception and behavior precisely because they subvert standard epistemological filters.

A move toward genuine sense of responsibility toward others is something that often emerges out of the shared experience of disaster. Just as you can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink, you can lead people towards enlightenment but you can't make them think. Experience is the great teacher. Since we'd obviously rather not use disaster as our classroom, it's incumbent on us to create experiences that are sufficiently meaningful to alter behavior.

I would also add that with education, at least in the US, not only would it take too long, but it's actually going backwards. Just look at the anti-vaxxer movement.

If you really want an outbreak of radical self-awareness, cross your fingers, hire every young organic chemist you can find, and start producing industrial quantities of LSD.

But that brings us back to "magic science".

When stating facts is criticized as fear mongering by "intellectuals," you know the world is irreversibly fucked

To me it is the difference between actually finding a solution and deciding that failure to fix X is a moral failing.

>Birth control has resulted in a decline in teen pregnancies and population stabilization where it is available.

Birth control has also contributed to escalated rates of dysgenic fertility. Smarter people use it and don't pass their genes on, while those with worse future planning abilities disregard it and have more children.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289615...

The other thing is that people don't really think this is a true emergency.

(Raises hand.)

Get back to me when Al Gore, Leo DiCaprio, and a thousand other wealthy frauds who lecture me about my SUV swear off flying on private jets.

When the people who keep telling me AGW is an emergency actually start acting like it's an emergency, I might take them seriously.

This is not an intellectually honest argument. Did it ever occur to you that Al Gore and Leo DiCaprio might be rationally self-interested agents who don't care about the damage they cause to others by flying private jets? They talk about global warming because it gains them social status - that fact alone does not tell you whether global warming is real or not. You are taking their two-faced behavior as evidence against global warming, when it is not evidence.

>You are taking their two-faced behavior as evidence against global warming...

You cannot logically conclude that based on what I wrote.

That's the clear implication from what you wrote - did you not write it to dismiss the likelihood of global warming being caused by humans, and severe?

> That's the clear implication from what you wrote

It is absolutely NOT the clear implication from what I wrote.

But while we're on the subject, do you have any theories as to why the people who wring their hands about the dire emergency that AGW supposedly is, never seem to call out rich, left-wing celebrities or rich left-wing tech moguls for their planet-destroying lifestyles?

I can easily answer that question: some do, but you don't listen to them. Some don't because they understood you don't care about them doing so.

You're not interested in why they do or don't do it, in fact. You're merely interested in making a whataboutist point.

>I can easily answer that question: some do, but you don't listen to them. Some don't because they understood you don't care about them doing so.

You're not interested in why they do or don't do it, in fact. You're merely interested in making a whataboutist point.

Are you omniscient? You seem to think you are.