Why we do nothing to prepare for climate change - Fabius Maximus website"Summary: The results are meager from thirty years of debate about a public policy response to climate change.
There is little support in America for action, the IPCC’s AR5 has disappeared from the news, much of the public no longer trust climate scientists, and debate has almost stopped.
The weather will determine future policy, not our foresight.
But we can see what went wrong and so do better next time – while we wait to see the price we pay for our folly.
...The decay of climate science
Qui tacet consentire videtur ubi loqui debuit ac potuit.
– Roman adage: silence means assent when he ought to have spoken and was able to.
To convince people to fight climate change, they must trust climate scientists.
While events during the first 25 years of the campaign made some people skeptical of the need for action, events in the past five years drastically polarized public opinion so that compromise became impossible.
While events during the first 25 years of the campaign made some people skeptical of the need for action, events in the past five years drastically polarized public opinion so that compromise became impossible.
The IPCC’s Working Group I reports (the physical sciences) are the “gold standard” description of climate research and the most reliable statement of scientists’ consensus. But by 2011 activists were saying they were “too conservative.” This became a widespread response by activists to the release of AR5 in 2013 (e.g., Inside Climate News and Yale’s Environment 360). Now activists explicitly attack the IPCC’s integrity, advocating it twist the science to support activists’ agenda. For example, see this March 2019 paper in Bioscience. (Here is a technical, if narrow, look at the issue from a risk management perspective.)
With little pushback by climate science leaders or their institutions, activists ran wild, making claims with little or no basis in science. Fear-mongering became their tool to gain public support. For example, see …
- “The Uninhabitable Earth” by David Wallace-Wells in New York Magazine – “Famine, economic collapse, a sun that cooks us: what climate change could wreak – sooner than you think.” Expanded into a book: The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming
.
- “The five ways the human race could be WIPED OUT because of global warming” by Rod Ardehali at the Daily Mail. Promo for Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?
, a book by Bill McKibben.
- “Climate Change Could End Human Civilisation as We Know It by 2050, Analysis Finds“, about a far-fetched scenario (worse than the unlikely or impossible RCP8.5, the worst-case in the IPCC’s AR5) described in a report by the Breakthrough National Centre for Climate Restoration. Many journalists gave it uncritical reviews, such as the NY Post and USA Today.
Some activist scientists endorse these claims. Journalists give even wild claims priority coverage. So we get scores of deadlines for action – climate “tipping points” – during the past 30 years, like trolleys passing by. And we get a stream of stories like those described in these posts …
- Weather porn about Texas, a lesson for Earth Day 2019.
- Terrifying predictions about the melting North Pole!
- The Extinction Rebellion’s hysteria vs. climate science.
- Daily stories of climate death build a Green New Deal!
- Activists hope that fake news about droughts will win.
Activists have succeeded in convincing those people who see climate policy as a means to enact their leftist agenda..."
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