Let's take a moment and recognize the fear-mongering going on a few days ago where there were articles saying "this time is different because of climate change, this time climate change super fires have caused a national treasure to be destroyed"
The Bay area NEVER gets rain for like almost, 8 months of the year. This was a freak event.
When people responded "you don't get to be a 1000+ year old tree without being able to survive fires" the response was "yeah but that was before climate change. These trees are likely gone forever now because climate change combined with fire suppression is causing super fires that burn much hotter"
They were referring to the buildings.
Ironic?
It is reasonable people will make mistakes, lots of them, so let's stop prefixing predictions with probability qualifiers "it's very likely X will happen" as if our limited information is enough to quantify a probability % of liklihood. I've seen dozens of "very likely" predictions on HN fall flat once more information came out within the past few years alone.
If COVID19 has a 15% chance of leading to a million people on long-term disability, that justifies a lot of precautions. You can phrase that as a mathematical equation, where you sum up the outcomes, average, and get an expected value, or as an emotion. In this case, the outcome is the same.
Ditto for climate change. I agree the worst-case is unlikely, and people get ahead by presenting the worst-case, but "unlikely" means 10%, not 0%. In the grand scheme of things, switching to sustainable technologies isn't too expensive.
And things with 15% odds will fall flat 5 times out of 6.
I think the bigger problem we have is an inability to move. We should have dealt with COVID19 when it first appeared. We should be doing a lot more to deal with climate change. And so on. Problem-solving is the best way to mitigate fear.