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Comment by pauljurczak | Hacker News Reader

They also ruled out the worst case scenario, but this doesn't sell equally well...

True but from what I understand of the matter (which isn't that much tbf), +2.3C is predicted to be already pretty fucking horrible, to say nothing of +3C...

+3C still sounds much better than +4.5C, which was the upper bound mentioned there.

It was +3.9.

It makes sense to phrase it like that when politics worldwilde neglected the issue presumably hoping for best case scenarios.

It makes sense to phrase it like that when politics worldwilde neglected the issue presumably hoping for best case scenarios.

Constantly banging the drum of the worst case scenario has lead to doom fatigue. That is the only explanation for the current apathy.

>It makes sense to phrase it like that

No, it's lying by omission.

Especially given that the media has been pushing a narrative that the worst-case scenarioes are our actual reality (or even worse-than-worst-case ones), so ruling them out is in fact incredibly significant - it's effectively ruling out what readers of articles like this one are likely to expect to actually happen. (To be fair, it looks like Bloomberg are slightly better than some of the rest of the press in that they seem to have rejected stuff like RCP8.5 that has already been falsified by what's actually happened, rather than pretending it matches reality.)

"Best case scenario" is a moving target when you do nothing.

That doesn't make the scenarios we're headed for any less horrific.

>They also ruled out the worst case scenario, but this doesn't sell equally well...

Fear sells better.

An imaginary doctor tells you: "You have between 2-10 years left to live."

A few months later: "Ah, we have an update, you have 4-8 years."

Yay?

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