Americans Don’t Understand How Bad Climate Change Is or What They Can Do

The report doesn't seem that scary, actually. The sections on particular impacts list reasonable mitigation actions (that don't have the tragedy of commons problem that climate change prevention does); and the particular impact of sea level rise you quote isn't that large or scary - the listed uncertain, faraway damage is much smaller than the certain, immediate cost of CO2 reduction we'd want. It's large enough to motivate local politicians to plan for mitigation activities - since no matter what they do (and in the absence of global coordination) they'll still be needed, we'll face some global warming and sea level rise even in the most optimistic scenario; but losing 2% of national real estate value over 80 years isn't economic justification for, say, meaningful reduction of consumption; sacrificing 0.1% GDP growth per year (which isn't nearly enough to combat climate change) is a much, much larger cost than the $500 billion tag.

As I skim it, nothing in that report has anything to convince people that "we're all going to horribly suffer if we don't act NOW". Yes, the effects are bad, but any personal impact I can derive from the descriptions in that report are on the same scale as the affected people would see in any major economic downturn.

The regional chapters in particular seem to have very little alarming content; it seems to center on "yep, this area is slowly to get worse, so we need extra infrastructure and preparation" - the described effects sound like sufficient justification for an 1% tax rate hike and doubling of insurance premiums, but not sufficient justification to mandate serious lifestyle change to try and prevent the consequences.

That's a prime example of what I'm talking about - vague statements ("sensitive", "decline", "threaten") about global effects on complex systems ("the food chain").

What is the expected specific, immediate, local effect of that? Can you tell a particular person (the abovementioned Midwest farmer) some particular clear consequence of phytoplankton decline he's going to personally experience in his lifetime (say, 2070) or the lifetime of his kids (say, 2100) if he doesn't do the utmost to prevent climate change change ?

The articles you quoted make no really scary (to the target audience) claims whatsoever. The third includes an expected impact on agriculture (https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article/figure/image?d...) which shows neutral or even positive effects on agriculture in much of first world (and horrible effects on Brasil and SE Asia, but that's not relevant to the USA consumer whom we're asking to change habits).

Substancial == lowering your live style to the level of Bangladesh, if you want a to be sustainable, that is.

Do you realize the infrastructure required to support your "green" urban living ?

What if I can’t afford to get off work to go to these zoning meetings in the middle of the day? What then?

Or, what if I live in rural America? How do you expect me to give up my car?

What if I already drive less than 10k miles a year?

It's rapidly approaching that point already. The problem is politicians and it seems as though we are powerless to change that.

But they might just burn oil and coal to save jobs.

Lower EV prices to $10k with a 250 miles range and refill time below 10 minutes (pretty much the standard european/asian small car) and I'll buy one right now.

The technology just isn't there currently...

I hadn't considered that the point of this article was to communicate outside of the U.S. Sure. For the rest of the English-Speaking world, use Centigrade.

For the U.S. market, Farhenheit works better. At first look to an American, 104 is SEVEN greater than 97; 40 is only four bigger than 36; 36 is slightly over freezing; and 40 is noticeably more comfortable. You might think that Americans are going to think about ratios and worry that 40/36 might be greater than 104/97, but 1) calculating ratios like that is not a common U.S. thing, and 2) by using an arbitrary end point, Farhenheit discourages applying ratios to temperatures.

On second look, for an American, those numbers should not be attended to at all, because they are shrouded in the ambiguity of what you will get after you do the math. About half of Americans can't do multi-step math even with pencil and paper (according to the National Adult Literacy Survey of the National Center for Educational Statistics in the U.S. government).

There is nothing misleading in translating to to Fahrenheit. Why sacrifice rhetorical advantage by trying to make Americans more "civilised"? (Mind you, on that front we're already doomed, spelling it "civilized".)

What this brings up is endowing Huffpost with automated localization.