Wow. Jag Bhalla offers one of the most sensible, thought-provoking, and wholly convincing articles I have ever read.
Title: "Climate Optimism Is Dangerous and Irrational"
Subtitle: "Overly-confident math models based on unrealistic assumptions are used to avoid crisis-consistent climate policies and to protect global elite privilege, while abandoning our duties to the planet’s most vulnerable."
It includes these section headings:
‣ The IPCC’s Official Modeling Malarkey
‣ The Worst Offenders: The Economists
I hope you can take the time to read the entire article. It's very long, extremely well-researched, and completely devastating.
This is near the conclusion...
Climate change is not just going to be “apocalyptic,” it’s already apocalyptic.
It’s just that the apocalypse is not something that happens to the entire world at once. Instead, the apocalyptic events are experienced mostly by the world’s poorest people (who, incidentally, have contributed the least to creating the problem). Who, witnessing the scale of flooding in Pakistan last year, could possibly say that the climate crisis is not “apocalyptic,” unless you regard Pakistanis as unpeople whose well-being simply doesn’t factor into the equation? 33 million people were displaced, and millions of homes destroyed.
When white Western elites publish books with titles like "It’s Not The End of The World" or "Apocalypse Never" or "False Alarm", what they mean is “it’s not the end of the world for people like me,” “apocalyptic conditions will never be experienced by my sector of society,” and “those of us who are among the world’s richest do not need to be alarmed.”
Of course, even these are false comforts — the mansions of Malibu are flammable, after all.
The worst part about climate optimism is the insistence of respected climate scientists, who have tried to make sense out of a system that has treated them badly, that we have to be optimistic or "studies have shown" that people will get discouraged and do nothing.
@breadandcircuses
"In May of 2020, early in the COVID-19 pandemic, a White House economist used what is called a “curve-fitting” model to predict that COVID deaths would end within ten days
That prediction turned out to be off by at least a million more American deaths and counting..
Data-savvy media mocked this “absurd and dangerous chart” as “amateur hour.” ... Trump White House model by writing that such “curve-fitting models have generated some spectacularly stupid projections.”
@breadandcircuses Of course, economists and even many GOOD scientists have been bamboozled by hypercautious modeling and forecasts that, as I just posted, result in the refrain "faster (and worse) than we thought" for decades. The DRIVERS of this horror are gummints in thrall to assholes like these who MUST be eliminated from any power and all assets redirected.