If you're going to say that all green types are nuts because everything is hunky dory, you have to at least put in some claim that the Earth isn't even really warming, or isn't warming as much as we thought, or that rapid warming is good. Any of them would be false, but you've at least got to try.
Always focusing on the negative and problems has many thinking there has not been positive movement, has left people with more anxiety and depressions, and causes hordes of other problems.
Celebrating and talking about positives is important. It doesn't mean all things are hunky dory. But, it's healthy to do.
In particular, what parts were ranty? I didn't see anything that would rise to the level of a rant. It's remarkably good natured given the invectives routinely dished out by those who would disagree.
Where exactly are you getting this from? It's certainly not from the science.
If you're going to argue this pedantically, perhaps don't start by claiming you know the opinions of every scientist, because if we're being pedantic, that's obviously not true.
Less pedantically, I think we agree that probably humans will survive global warming. But I think that we can agree that there's a temperature that's not survivable, even if we don't know what temperature that is. There's no long-term upper bound on how hot earth can get, and we're modeling uncharted territory: earth has never been as hot as it's going to get, while life has been on earth. So we really don't know how bad it will get. There is some chance that global warming will literally wipe out humanity, and given the stakes, I think that's a significant risk we need to be addressing.
By that reasoning, literally everything is an existential threat to humanity.
I mean that's even less scientific than what climate deniers say.
Is this what the world has come to? You have two camps: climate deniers, and climate alarmists, neither party caring in the slightest about science?
Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum [0]
The associated period of massive carbon release into the atmosphere has been estimated to have lasted from 20,000 to 50,000 years. The entire warm period lasted for about 200,000 years. Global temperatures increased by 5–8 °C. Paired δ13C, δ11B, and δ18O data suggest that ~12000 Gt of carbon (at least 44000 Gt CO 2e) were released over 50,000 years, averaging 0.24 Gt per year.
Since at least 1997, the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum has been investigated in geoscience as an analog to understand the effects of global warming and of massive carbon inputs to the ocean and atmosphere, including ocean acidification. Humans today emit about 10 Gt of carbon per year, and will have released a comparable amount in about 1,000 years at that rate.
Take a look also at "Abrupt climate change" article [1]:
Timescales of events described as 'abrupt' may vary dramatically. Changes recorded in the climate of Greenland at the end of the Younger Dryas, as measured by ice-cores, imply a sudden warming of +10 °C (+18 °F) within a timescale of a few years. Other abrupt changes are the +4 °C (+7.2 °F) on Greenland 11,270 years ago or the abrupt +6 °C (11 °F) warming 22,000 years ago on Antarctica.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleocene%E2%80%93Eocene_Therm... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abrupt_climate_change
I often wonder about that. It could also be that our collective attention can only handle one big emergency at the time, and we make that our sole focus.
I would not be surprised if in some years another emergency will dominate the news. Maybe its about ecocide then, large-scale collapse of ecosystems due to a combination of overfishing, poaching, natural habitat destruction and pollution. And man-made climate change only an additional factor in that.
It seems to depend very much on where you are:
Countries with an aggregate population today of roughly six billion will suffer for it, though.
It was alluded to in this section (ctrl-f "emissions"):
>> A wind farm requires far more concrete and steel than an equivalent system based on gas. Environmental opposition to nuclear power has hindered the generating system that needs the least land, least fuel and least steel or concrete per megawatt. Burning wood instead of coal in power stations means the exploitation of more land, the eviction of more woodpeckers — and even higher emissions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pellet_fuel?wprov=sfla1
Interesting. I wonder how much power is available from that.
http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk
I'm not convinced it's all waste product.
> Europe imported more than 4 million tons of wood pellets from US forests last year and wrote it all off as renewable energy.
https://www.businessinsider.com/europe-imports-wood-biomass-...
Coal is very energy dense. Imports and other automated machinery like wood-cutting machines, planes for seed planting all burn oil. If you import coal and import wood, you could end up burning a lot more fuel with the wood option.
Now, that's kind of a tricky form of accounting because it would make wood burning worse from the perspective of the importing country only. But the carbon was still pulled out of the atmosphere in the exporting country.
The real reason wood burning/planting doesn't make much sense for reducing emissions is just one of scale. You end up needing to plant billions of trees to balance even just airline travel, let alone everything else. There isn't enough space short of terraforming deserts and other very energy intensive activities that probably wouldn't balance.
What I think the author misses is the interplay between pessimists identifying problems and innovators creating solutions. A voice identifying a severe problem is important, but do is the own saying “we got this, let’s fix it.”