The truth is that most (Western) people simply don’t care that much.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_sea_ice_decline#Ice-fre...
> Many scientists have attempted to estimate when the Arctic will be "ice-free". Professor Peter Wadhams of the University of Cambridge is among these scientists; Wadhams in 2014 predicted that by 2020 "summer sea ice to disappear," Wadhams and several others have noted that climate model predictions have been overly conservative regarding sea ice decline. A 2013 paper suggested that models commonly underestimate the solar radiation absorption characteristics of wildfire soot. In 2007, Professor Wieslaw Maslowski from the Naval Postgraduate School, California, predicted removal of summer ice by 2013; subsequently, in 2013, Maslowski predicted 2016 ±3 years.
Looks to me like there have been plenty of overly-alarming predictions about a Blue Ocean Event over the last two decades.
As it is, I don't think even the over-aggressive calls have "totally missed the mark"; what we're seeing now says maybe they were off by a few years. In terms of global risk analysis around climate change, that error doesn't really matter all that much. Calling to address a major tipping point a few years early is arguably a feature, even.
You actually expect them to nail it down to the year? lol
The last prediction from that quote was made in 2013 and predicted 2016 +/- 3 years.
Inaccuracies aren't the issue here. The problem is that well-intentioned scientists and politicians are making overly-alarming predictions that keep eroding the populations trust when they keep failing to come true. How do you convince someone to believe you when you say climate change is a real, serious, and immediate threat when they have been lied to about the subject over and over again?
But if your takeaway from that is that scientists are overconfident and wrong, that is insane, because the important thing to know about sea ice is that at its yearly minimum, its volume is a third of what it was in 1980. No matter how you cut it, it's almost gone.
my takeaway is that every years hundred models are given birth, every year later the model fitting the data best survive, and two year later when that last model prediction fail, a new model from the previous that that predicted the change better replaces it, in a never ending cycle of bullshit.
the models go both way: without a predictive model that can hold water, how do you know which parameter to tune to resolve the climate crisis?
He said they hurt the public trust in climate science when their predictions do not reliably come true.
Some scientists are going to sometimes be wrong about things. It is impossible for them to be scientists otherwise.
OP just said that conservative predictions are better than aggressive ones, as they're more likely to come true and thus build trust.
It is not possible to have an accurate mean prediction, and also to have no predictions above the mean.
I just pointed out that you were arguing with something other than what OP said.
Maybe it's too slow but the end is near for fossil fuels, it's either because humans will end up extinct if we keep burning it at the current rate or because it's not economically competitive anymore.
As corrupt and as rotten as politics is, there is a limit to how far you can push for coal and fracking before it just becomes silly.
That'll happen anyway with carbon taxes. Or at least it'll cost a lot more and many people will do less of it. Until we have carbon taxes, you could choose to do it voluntarily to help out.
> pave forests with solar panels
I don't think anyone is seriously suggesting that.
> What happened to nuclear
Expensive and difficult to build. But if you like it, France, the UK and India are still doing it. And you're always free to advocate for it. "They oppose nuclear" isn't a great reason to stop working with people on solving the problem of climate change. Why be so prescriptive in solutions by saying "nukes or bust"?
> geoengineering
You mean the thing that's already gotten us into this mess?
> fair revenue-neutral carbon taxes
Cheers to that. A lot of the people you dislike politically support those. Work with them.
It's still worth trying to pursue a more popular version of a carbon tax because of how efficient they are, but we need to acknowledge their political shortcomings. Perhaps we could pair a carbon tax with an annual distribution of revenue raised to everyone - a carbon bonus - so people see a direct benefit too instead of just the tax.
Regardless we need to explore other solutions too, since it's not going to be enough to stop the climate from destabilizing further.
Pretty much this. Use it to fund UBI maybe. The Canadian province of British Columbia collects a carbon tax and reduces income taxes by a commensurate amount.[1]
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Columbia_carbon_tax
>> geoengineering
> You mean the thing that's already gotten us into this mess?
What got us into this mess is geo-moving-fast-and-breaking-things. Everyone chasing short-term profits and dumping externalities on everyone else.
I don't get the hate for geoengineering - i.e. planned, large-scale interventions. Sure, it would be better to not need it, but the way things are heading, we very well might.
Think of geoengineering as chemo for the planet - a very blunt treatment with bad, large-scale consequences, that we apply anyway, because the disease it fights is even worse.
Unintended consequences. Unless it's direct carbon capture, there is no guarantee we won't create worse problems.
"Geoengineering" is itself a very generic term.
> What particular consequences are we talking about,
They would depend on the particular geoengineering technique we're talking about.
The whole point of unintended consequences is they are not or could not be anticipated before the fact.
Other than direct carbon capture i.e. geoengineering that's a direct inverse of the problem we have right now, I'm not confident we can predict everything that can go wrong with any given geoengineering solution. Even direct carbon capture is likely to have some serious downsides at scale we haven't yet considered.
Preventing climate change from getting worse requires coordinated action at the national and international levels. There are many proposed solutions, but so far none of them have been implemented and it's unclear our government systems are sophisticated enough to do so, to the detriment of us all.
Incidentally, I think the primary driver of state-level bans on single use plastic straws was to reduce plastic waste, especially in the oceans.
But a ideological behavioral change ("eat less meat") enforced on everybody is much more political (ideological) than just implementing the required nudges/incentives (less carbon) and allowing everybody to adjust their behavior as they see fit.
Everything involving money is political.
Carbon taxes also allow solutions to be arrived at organically vs via fiat which also reduces opportunity for corruption when the pricing is transparent.