[fromthestart]

That's not how science works. Some scientists theorized that CO2 emissions could have consequences for climate. There was a lot of theoretical and technological development that needed to happen before such an outlandish (at the time and up until the recent present) idea could be verified and acted upon. It's no small claim to suggest that humans can not only alter global climate, but do so in a catastrophic manner. Add to the mix the social and economic cost of acting on such a theory, and it makes sense to understand and prove the science with some minimum certainty before using it to justify massive policy change.

Hindsight is 20/20. Even now, because of the nature of what amounts to an empirical science who's primary effects will only be measured in the future, we haven't unambiguously proven that climate change is occuring, and cannot do so without additional decades or centuries of data, at which point it may be too late.

It is similarly fallacious to accuse oil companies of knowing about this problem and failing to act. 30 years ago this was similarly a theory with even less evidence than today, and only a handful of scientists even considered it.

[jellicle]

None of that is true. It has never been considered outlandish except by oil company PR teams. Simple math from the very beginning of the fossil fuel era made it obvious we would eventually run into problems. It has been extremely obvious for decades that the predicted problems were here, now.

There's no social or economic cost to the world for acting to prevent climate change. The costs are all negative - we save vast amounts of money and societal damage by acting.

There hasn't been any serious scientific dispute over whether climate change was occurring for at least 50 years.

And of course it's completely accurate to note that the oil companies knew about the problem and have not only refused to act, but have spent massive amounts to prevent action. Many of their own documents are available on the internet for your inspection.

[fromthestart]

>It has never been considered outlandish except by oil company PR teams.

You're describing catastrophic terraforming on the scale of about 100 years. That's a huge claim with enormous ramifications and given the current expense of mitigation, it rightly warrants scrutiny, both in probability of occurance and scope of change.

>Simple math from the very beginning of the fossil fuel era made it obvious we would eventually run into problems.

Absolutely nothing about climate change is simple. Which is why it took decades to establish any kind of consensus. Global climate is a chaotic function of various positive and negative feedback mechanisms - simply noting that increasing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gasses may cause climate change is not nearly enough to conclude that there is a problem without considering the hugely complex system in it's entirety.

>It has been extremely obvious for decades that the predicted problems were here, now.

We've been collecting the very data necessary to prove the "obviousness" of climate change over the same decades in which you claim the problem was already evident. You need time series data to establish a trend with any kind of certainty, and climate changes at a minimum over hundreds of years.

>There's no social or economic cost to the world for acting to prevent climate change. The costs are all negative - we save vast amounts of money and societal damage by acting.

Like the rest of your post, your perspective is biased by your assertion that climate change is happening. You need to view this from the perspective of a society which has not had time to perform the necessary data gathering and analysis to make such conclusion - in which case, there are now and were decades ago current costs to switching off of fossil fuels, which it would only be reasonable to incur given a minimum degree of certainty in future climate change. It is simply infesible to make drastic policy changes for every sounded alarm - one must obviously consider the expected value of the change, which is (disaster cost)*(probability of disaster)-(cost of change). The value of this probability is difficult to model and has been steadily increasing with recent climate science.

>There hasn't been any serious scientific dispute over whether climate change was occurring for at least 50 years.

Just decades ago the consensus was that of global cooling. Again, you underestimate the complexity of determining whether the climate is actually changing and, in particular, how it will change in the future.

>And of course it's completely accurate to note that the oil companies knew about the problem

Again, oil companies did not "know" of the problem, they were aware of the possibility of the problem. The very documents which you mention state that additional modeling was required to determine anything with certainty.