[jdietrich]

If climate skeptics are right, we will have only hastened the inevitable transition away from fossil fuels - there's only enough coal, oil and gas in the ground to last us another century, give or take.

If climate skeptics are wrong, millions of people will die due to avoidable natural disasters and hundreds of millions will become climate refugees.

Those are our choices - do the thing we need to do anyway, or put it off until later and risk catastrophe.

Asking whether or not climate change is "real" is entirely the wrong question. It's always the wrong question. We need to ask what the probability is, how wide the error bars are and what the effect size will be across the range of possible outcomes. Even if our predictions are wrong by a couple of orders of magnitude, reducing our carbon emissions is +EV. Doing something now is obviously the best course of action, because you avert a high-probability and high-magnitude loss at a relatively low marginal cost.

[briantakita]

Your set of choices is limited & reflective of a certain narrative.

First, many (including Russia) contend that petroleum is not old plant matter, but made from a geological process. We also have plenty of Coal & Natural Gas; never mind Solar energy.

There's also weather modification (e.g. Stratospheric aerosol injection). There's also other forms of energy.

There's also Electrogravitics, which contends that Gravity & Electricity are related. The Electrogravitic model provides a unified model that is simpler than String Theory.

If Electrogravitics is an accurate model, then we are living on a massive engine (planet Earth) & can, as Nikola Tesla has demonstrated, harvest the energy generated by this engine.

[SlowRobotAhead]

While not unfair... I think the difference between the two scenarios you aren't understanding is the absolute truth that: We will use every drop of oil there is, until it's gone.

Solar doesn't make great plastic. You know what carbon fiber is - it's burnt plastic that's been processed with lots of oil and electricity. We know of no better stable and denser energy storage than hydrocarbons, we're going to use all of it.

[hcknwscommenter]

Very good points. The other point that people often misunderstand is that there is a VERY HIGH PROBABILITY that anthropogenic global warming skeptics are mostly or entirely wrong.