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Comment by dead-snake | Hacker News Reader

These doomsday prophecies are always conveniently distant. You can tell people any scary nonsense as long as it's far enough away that everyone will have forgotten the details of your prediction by the time it fails to come to pass.

It's just the same as how we can show people today any number of doomsday prophecies from the past about how the world was definitely going to be wrecked by 2020, or 2010, or 2000, or 1990, but somehow nobody thinks they were serious back then... but then they take the doomsday prophecy about 2030 seriously.

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They are probably slightly different prophecies and the nuances get lost by the media and/or by readers.

1990: We are 10 years from being unable to stop climate change. -- Happened.

2000: We are 10 years from coral reefs being killed. -- Happened.

2010: We are 10 years from farms being permanently scorched. -- Happening.

The Branch Davidians said the world is ending in 1993. That doesn't render our understanding of climate change 'scary nonsense'.

The issue OP is making is that climate scientists have forecasted "tipping points"[0] for years on end now, and none of them have come true. It ruins the credibility of these "point of no return" articles.

[0] https://cei.org/blog/wrong-again-50-years-of-failed-eco-poca...

No-one’s arguing a cliff edge other than media spinning drama for clicks.

The direction of travel has been clear, understood and consistent for decades, as has the messaging from the scientific community around it.

You seem to be confusing a bunch of cherry-picked newspaper clippings with scientific research.

Not sure what sort of "coming true" you guys are expecting. We're looking at a pretty unusual level of drought, fires, and flooding disasters all over the world, new temperature records almost every year, and faster temperature increases and ice loss than the IPCC had projected.

Back in 2007 the book Six Degrees was published, with one chapter per degree of warming, summing up the science of what results we would see. We're at one degree and everything in that chapter is happening now.

Exactly.

That you would just batch up any amount of cultish astrological nonsense and equate it with science because they both make predictions is ridiculous.

By this logic you might as well insist the Earth is flat because Columbus didn’t end up in India.

I think this is why young people think boomers are dumb when in reality boomers have just been burned over and over with doom predictions and by political lies obviously said to earn votes. These doom predictions are always conveniently 10 years away, long enough that it feels close and urgent but so it also feels that we still have time to fix. My high schooler came home one day just last year and said they learned that we are going to run out of fossil fuels in 10 years so we have to convert everything to renewable right away. I told him 25 years ago I ‘learned’ in high school that we would run out of fossil fuels in 10 years also. They even explained the models in my day not just showed the results to you. They had the total available stores, usage rate over time, predicted finding of new resources, and it was all neatly organized into charts perfectly that made it look impossible to be wrong to a high schooler whose only knowledge on the topic came from school.

And these prophecies are always of the 'worse than previously thought' kind. It really just makes me question how sophisticated climate modelling actually is/was.

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