The word might is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that article.
Whether the prophet uses computer models and fat piles of data and is called a scientist or not is a detail.
If you get bad news, look at the proportionality of cost preparing for the event compared to the cost of the event. A pandemic preparation and proper pre-warn system (as South korea and taiwan had it) would have cost absolutly nothing compared to the pandemic cost.
Same goes for gulf stream collapse. Cost of the for-warning system, cost of agricultural switch of europe to the canadian model, against the cost of not doing so..
Fair enough.
The difficulty arises in context when a menu of risks exist, and resources to mitigate them are insufficient to address all of the risks sufficiently.
Choices occur, and consequences follow.
The problem is that a huge proportion of those resources is being hoarded by the super-rich.
As a society, we have collectively decided that allowing massive, unprecedented concentration of wealth is more important than addressing any of the critical issues facing us today.
Personally, I disagree with that decision, and believe we should require those who can part with billions of dollars without it affecting their lifestyle in any way to do so for the benefit of all.
The budget for it was 800 million dollars.
It was removed from the budget in 2018 and I believe the funding ran out September 2019.
It only took three months.
By March 2020-the administration was putting out $800 BILLION dollars.
And since then they’ve put out more.
Taiwan—which adopted the US system (and therefore was in Wuhan January 4) had no real outbreak until 2 month ago—and even then, the outbreak was contained.
Frustrating…
I wonder whether people would take the decisions more seriously if they had to vote on them as they so in Switzerland.
If you were to switch overnight to referenda in say the United States the result would be mayhem.
The difference seems to be whether the appeal is to the intellect, or the appeal is to fear.
At any point in this journey the climate problems could have been brushed aside by going nuclear. If we aren't going to go nuclear, then we've done the sensible thing and waited for renewables to be cost competitive.
The science is following trends, using models and projections. There are real measures that show more instabilities, signs of weakening and the models explain why with confidence. From that we can anticipate, knowing the accumulated effects from trends may "lag" by 30-50 years. For anticipation, this means events will worsen over that span even if we stop emissions.
That greenhouse gases in a closed vessel causes warming when light shines is settled science past 100 years. We see cooling stratosphete and warming troposphere, all in line with the models.
It's kind of like discovering your house is on fire, then arguing warmth is good for cooking.