Society should be given informed consent, I agree. But doesn’t that mean everyone should know and understand that most of the actual science being done is all independently and from many different angles coming to the same conclusion that our industrial activities seem to be increasing the CO2 levels and potentially warming the earth much faster than any time in history, and much faster than any of the natural cycles, save for a couple of extreme volcanic eruptions and large meteors? Doesn’t informed consent in fact mean letting the public know that our policy decisions today
might affect whether our grandkids can expect to ever see snow? Your argument here seems totally reasonable, I’m just curious how it meshes with your top comment.
Is it really hard to believe, surprising, or even debatable, that running several billion combustion engines all day every day globally that all emit CO2 would increase atmospheric CO2? Is it really in question whether adding a lot of CO2 to the air for a hundred years might raise the temperature?
Be aware that bringing up CO2 levels from 30 million years ago as some kind of demonstration that today’s CO2 levels might be “normal” is also cherry-picking and exaggerating, similar to NASA’s not using zero as the graph’s baseline, it’s also attempting to frame the debate in a way that downplays what’s happening today. The problem isn’t necessarily the CO2 level at all, it’s the magnitude and velocity of the anomaly today relative to recent history. It doesn’t take data from all time to see that the last century’s bump in CO2 levels might be something to worry about.
The problem in the US is we have a political party that denies climate change exists largely on the grounds that doing anything about it will be disruptive to the economy (without worrying whether doing nothing could be even more disruptive, nor what our long term goals are). The primary climate change skeptic argument in this country isn’t based on investigating the science, it’s currently based on denying science. When you said “climate change is a global flood myth” without providing any evidence of why our current published science is wrong, I interpreted that to be a political stance and not one based on science. You do seem genuinely interested in the science though, so it may be important to stop reading material from politicians and focus on investigating primary sources, and understanding what exactly the scientific consensus really is.
What if the politics of climate change denial undermines our ability to have informed consent? What if climate skeptics are winning the debate despite the science, and convincing policy makers to not take action? What exactly are the risks of taking action to reduce emissions, in the cases where the effects have been overstated vs understated? What are the best case and worst case scenarios? Why not reduce emissions anyway just because breathing pollution is causing health problems? The earth is going to survive whatever happens, with or without humans. Life will go on even if we kill ourselves. All the questions and debate are only about what’s good for us humans, and mainly in the short term. We’re fighting over how much money to spend this week and not really talking about what life will be like in a hundred or thousand years.
BTW, your top comment also complained about calling any and all weather anomalies evidence of climate change. FWIW, there is a plausible scientific argument called “global weirding” that centers on the fact that higher temperatures is literally more energy in the system that causes more strange things to happen that haven’t been happening historically. Any single event, single storm, single season, regional weather in a single year, you’re right that none of these by themselves indicate climate change. However, taken as a whole, the increasing frequency of odd/extreme weather events over many recent years is an indicator of change. I like how it’s described here: https://news.northeastern.edu/2012/03/20/globalweirding/