[joshypants]

Three things are true:

* We cannot let despair prevent us from acting. The big changes needed are possible, and we need to accelerate them.

* We actually don't know with certainty how bad it is going to get.

* People, in general, are not scared enough right now.

[bogwog]

F.U.D. drove the world crazy during Y2K despite it not being an actual problem. Maybe we need a little bit of that here?

[Lendal]

The difference being that in the 90's we actually did things to prevent Y2K from becoming a problem.

[paulddraper]

Yes, that's what you found out when you stripped away the hysteria.

[Cthulhu_]

And when there was a hole in the ozone layer, for the first time ever the whole world agreed on a measure to stop it. That too was a global climate problem.

[jmull]

> despite it not being an actual problem

How do you figure that?

Not that there wasn't plenty of ignorant hysteria. But there was also a lot of real mitigation work. A lot of stuff didn't break on 1/1/2000 because we fixed the bugs before then.

[Clubber]

>We cannot let despair prevent us from acting.

When people feel a problem is hopeless, they cease to act. Climate alarmists trying to scare people into action with improbable outcomes, I feel, are being counter productive in this regard.

But the damage is already done. More alarmism (which is almost guaranteed) will be even more counter productive where people will just tune out.

[SuoDuanDao]

I quite agree. I'm a longtime environmentalist, and when climate change first became a major story I was all for it because CO2 emissions are an excellent proxy for pollution and resource depletion. Now I feel like what should be an integrative approach to a hairball of multiple wicked problems has been simplified to an obtuse marketing campaign, driven by the idea that if enough people agree on the scope of the problem they'll suddenly all pull in the same direction and we'll be most of the way to a solution.

I hate to say it, but I feel that climate change has become a distraction from doing real and necessary environmental work.

[breakyerself]

I find it hard to believe the real damage is from alarmism and not denialism and luke warmerism

[bryanlarsen]

People oversimplify to a binary. Yes, it's pretty much impossible to halt climate change at 1.5 degrees. So therefore they think we should do nothing -- why bother if it's going to happen anyway? But it's not anywhere close to binary: the more we do the less change that happens - we can't stop it from happening, but we can definitely stop it from getting worse.