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> "It's sad, but we've gotten to the point where you simply cannot trust major news organizations to report on science without ridiculous levels of clickbait spin."

news may have waxed and waned on reputability but it's never really been highly reputable. we had a blip from the 70s-90s where it was contextually limited enough that our national narrative was fairly aligned and unchallenged. but that exposed the natural weakness of monoliths, which provided an opening to folks like murdoch to exploit, followed by the explosion of social media, which increased noise several-fold while increasing signal much less than that.

there is no shortcut to thinking for yourself. that's a civic responsibility as much as an individual one. folks need to dig past the veneer presented to examine the veracity and credibility of the narrative presented.

when it comes to climate change, mediopolitical narrative imposes too much bullshit and religious fervor for most of us to make real sense of it, and that's why we mostly shortcut to tribal affiliation as a proxy for what we should think/believe.

personally, i think we should focus on (air, water, land) pollution first and foremost, as that is concretely a problem yesterday, today, and tomorrow, starting with reducing coal worldwide. strategically, that has the advantage of narrowing our focus (less bullshit and influence potential), doing something that materially helps us now, and potentially does something to help the far off climate future.

Science reporting could be skewed on some issues in the old days (floridation, marijuana) but it was rarely as hasty and sloppy as it gets now, frequently. The business model and technology then didn't support the same volume of publication, but it supported reporters well enough to allow them more time to investigate and write.

Headline writing was another matter back then, though. It was bad; just some dude trying to fit the space under time pressure because the ads were carefully planned, then the articles were quickly chopped to fit around them. Truncated headlines often reversed the meaning of the story or just went off the rails.

> ...was based on countries’ short-term goals for the next decade

What else though? There is no "long-term" for politicians that have to face another election in less than 4 years.

"This will happen in 10+ years" is just a thinly-veiled "We aren't going to do it.". If we can't get any short term commitments and hold people accountable for it, nothing substantial will get done.

> What else though? There is no "long-term" for politicians that have to face another election in less than 4 years.

Politicians used to have long term vision though. See the American founding fathers, Churchill, de Gaulle, etc.

Something changed, it wasn't always like that

Look at the New Green Deal proposed by some Democrats in 2019. It was a non-binding resolution. An attempt to give the US congress a long-term vision.

There wasn't an attempt to compromise. Every Republican Representative could have attempted an amendment to temper language they didn't like. There could have been a debate on the merits of the resolution.

It was turned into a hit piece so every time AOC is mentioned in social media some smarmy user pops up and screeches about hamburgers or cow flatulence.

How I see this unfolding, at the very least, is full-on militarization of the youth (mass protest, boycott, and terrorism) when they see that no one is doing anything substantive to solve the problem. You can already see quasi-violent climate change protests in the EU/UK.

They will organize via TikTok, or whatever social media dujour, and stop life as we know it.

Just keep bickering.

> Let's be perfectly clear: the projection you are citing is on the extreme end of a spectrum.

It's worth pointing out that "on the extreme end of a spectrum" is some rather blatant editorializing. There is simply no way that's an objective fact.

> After the past three years and watching their coverage of Covid (an area of science I know well, and in which I read the primary literature)

That's little more than an appeal to authority, to try to get us to believe your opinion, rather than highly-respected international organisations.

> I give zero credibility to the Guardian as a source of objective information.

The Guardian is not perfect, but generally gets the science pretty much right most of the time - at least compared to other news organisations. Saying it has "zero credibility" is hyperbole that rather reveals your biases.

Would you like to cite some projections you think are more accurate?

My interpretation of the "spectrum" comment was that, out of a number of predictions by different papers, the one cited is on the outer ranges of given values. That seems like an objective statement by itself.

> The Guardian is not perfect, but generally gets the science pretty much right most of the time - at least compared to other news organisations.

That caveat is a really low threshold, think of the Gell-Mann amnesia effect and "wet pavements cause rain" level of wrongness in the things other news orgs report.

> It's worth pointing out that "on the extreme end of a spectrum" is some rather blatant editorializing. There is simply no way that's an objective fact.

It's a fact reported by the very same article (but buried). I didn't make it up.

> Would you like to cite some projections you think are more accurate?

All projections are theoretical, but one needs only go to the IPCC to see that the range of reputable predictions varies:

https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/2/2019/02/SPM1...

Source of that figure:

https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/chapter/spm/

Most recent IPCC commentary on predictions to underscore that current estimates land in a range, and that the Guardian-cited source is definitely not in the middle of it:

https://www.ipcc.ch/2021/08/09/ar6-wg1-20210809-pr

> Most recent IPCC commentary on predictions to underscore that current estimates land in a range, and that the Guardian-cited source is not in the middle of it

Could you quote which part you are referring to?

If you look at the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report, it predicts for Shared Socioeconomic Pathway SSP2-4.5 (the middle of the options presented, "CO2 emissions around current levels until 2050, then falling but not reaching net zero by 2100") warming of 2.7C by 2100.

2.9C is not an extreme prediction at all.

2.9C is absolutely an extreme prediction. The figure I linked is from the IPCC SR15 (source was in the comment). Digging through the sixth assessment report, there's this:

https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg3/static/4d357606f10734acb3...

You can see that 5/8 of the projections fall below 2.5C, and 4/8 fall below 2C. The predictions that rise above 2.5C are the three most extreme categories of the report. There's simply no way to claim that a prediction of 2.9C is not "extreme". SSP2-4.5 is in category C6, which is the top 50% of all predictions.

Moreover, from the report describing the "categories":

> Around half of all modelled global emission scenarios assume cost-effective approaches that rely on least-cost emission abatement options globally. The other half look at existing policies and regionally and sectorally differentiated actions

So you're talking about a distribution of predictions where half assume little/no changes over current circumstances.

The problem with all of these scenario "categories" is that they're bucketed by maximum predicted temperature, so it all becomes a game of begging the question: if you choose to emphasize "category C7" from the IPCC report, it means only that you prefer to believe a scenario where warming tops out at 4C (literally the definition of C7).

Scenarios that make wildly different assumptions are grouped together, and it's impossible to know which ones are likely, and difficult to know which ones reflect current planned mitigations, etc. But this does show clearly the range of possible predicted outcomes -- if some newspaper comes along and tells you that "experts" are "predicting" a rise of 4C, you can know that they're on the tail of the distribution of reasonable predictions.

Edit: found the description of SSP2-4.5 (table SPM.2, here [1]). It assumes that we never hit net zero CO2 production, and that GHG emissions continue on their current path through 2050 with only minimal mitigatons. Is this realistic? Who knows. But it's certainly not the stated plan.

[1] https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg3/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6...

Given that the IPCC projections have been consistently conservative, and have been revised upward repeatedly, i personally do not consider 2.9 an extreme value.

>It assumes that we never hit net zero CO2 production, and that GHG emissions continue on their current path through 2050 with only minimal mitigatons

You mean...the path we are basically on, and have been on, since decades despite knowing the consequences? "Not the stated plan" is doing a lot of lifting here.

> Let's be perfectly clear: the projection you are citing is on the extreme end of a spectrum.

The upper bound of scientific predictions of climate change have generally been correct over the past 20 years.

We're not going to hit the targets, not even close. The models are trending worse than expected. As someone that has spent some time on this topic in my lifetime, all I can do is thank fate that I'm likely to be dead from natural causes around 2050.

Maybe the Guardian is bad (and I disagree with your opinion of them, I think they are generally reliable) but in this case, they are correct.

I've found that Guardian has by far the best environmental news coverage out of basically all mainstream outlets.

Making a press release saying that you are going to do something in 20 years is not a strong indication that you will actually do that thing. Unless a government is taking substantial short-term action that is consistent with that goal, then we should skeptical of those goals, and not put too much weight on projections based on them.

It’s sad, but we will simply never get past the point of rearranging the furniture while we argue about the accuracy of estimates of the iceberg’s size.

Why is this the font of your passion, rather than the desperate situation of our planet?

Why do you care about climate change when the world is going to end in nuclear war before we even hit +1.2C?

Don't question my projections, if you do, you're just rearranging deck chairs on the titanic.

I wonder how many nuclear bombs it would take to raise global temperature by an average of 1.2C? I'm sure a physicist could tell you, but I bet the number would be best expressed in exponential notation at least.

And if we were setting off that many bombs every day, I bet people would be a bit concerned.

No one will care about the temperature when there is no one.

What are they supposed to do? They said they don't trust the guardian for scientific news because they have read the actual scientific literature and noticed that the guardian engages in clickbait and hyperbole. They seem to understand the situation, they just don't like this particular outlet because in their experience it doesn't do a good job. Should they be typing in all caps about how we're all going to die instead?

Like it or not, a lot of people have lost trust in mainstream media outlets because they have seen said outlets engage in hyperbolic clickbait bullshit.

A fair question.

I feel much of the mourning of lost trust in media comes down to crocodile tears (“concern trolling” - though I don’t cast that label on any comment here). The well meant and often needed pedantry of the informed serves the disingenuous demagogue readily. And the informed themselves are often distracted from a moral urgency by ambiguity.

Ambiguity is kin to science but alien to modern and popular modes of ethical judgement. This failure of critical moral thinking is the crux of media’s challenge when reporting on climate change. I don’t believe the hoi polloi distrust journalists because they too are current with the latest studies.

In our present crises, there seems to me a choice between hyperbole and bikeshedding. The latter suits the present powers, the former all the possibility of a future.

> I feel much of the mourning of lost trust in media comes down to crocodile tears

In other words, anyone who questions a media narrative -- however obviously thoughtless or ridiculous -- is "concern trolling", and therefore worth dismissing.

> In our present crises, there seems to me a choice between hyperbole and bikeshedding.

We have to stop this black and white thinking. There's absolutely a wide area of reasonable disagreement possible here: we can agree that climate is a problem, but disagree on the costs / benefit tradeoffs of any proposed solution. Science and policy are two very different things, but one side of the political spectrum seems devoted to turning "science" into a political bludgeon for their preferred policies.

If you'd stop short of returning humanity to the stone age to stop climate change, then you, too, believe in reasonable tradeoffs. You can be a scientist and hold both things in your head at the same time.

Indeed, why bother with ensuring our predictions are reasonable at all? Let's just assume the absolute worst, all the time.

If we stop being objective and surrender ourselves to emotion and panic, then it stops being science, and all authority is lost.

The justification I would give: to get ourselves out of this pickle, it is plausible that we will require skilled thinking. Therefore, pursuing good thinking would make sense, and a component of that would be identifying bad thinking (as demonstration, and also perhaps as something to add to the "To Fix" list).

I continue to believe that the physical science is well beyond "good enough" and that humanity should now be investing in metaphysical inquiry (psychology, sociology, etc), as getting humans coordinated and pulling all in the same direction would be beneficial to sorting this mess and others out.