[aalleavitch]

We don't have the luxury of eating the investment on a "dry hole" when this is a global phenomenon. How is the path of highest caution not warranted here? What exactly are we losing by aggressively switching to renewables?

This isn't an academic question. It is an incredibly practical one.

[legolas2412]

That is a different argument , one that needs to be made.

OP is talking about people who spout doomsday predictions.

I once had a debate with someone who was convinced that humans were going extinct in the next century. He wasn't talking about migrations of hundred of millions, deaths of tens of millions, and climate patterns of droughts and floods changing, which are all present in predictions. He really believed that every single human was going to die. There are people who literally speak bullshit doomsday philosophy.

[aalleavitch]

To be fair, all that is really required for human extinction is for us to start firing our nukes. Geopolitically destabilizing events increase the potential for that considerably.

That's not in any way to say that climate change must necessarily lead to thermonuclear war or anything so dramatic as that, but human extinction is a real threat hanging over our heads at all times. It's something worth being worried about.

[legolas2412]

Just remembered, he was basing this on the planet being uninhabitable soon.

I find that laughable. Despite how quickly and how chaotically the climate changes, we are not going to go extinct because earth is becoming uninhabitable

[refurb]

If we spend hundreds of billions of dollars fighting CO2 (capturing it, moving to more expensive energy sources, etc), that’s hundreds of billions of dollars that could have been spent elsewhere, on other problems like cancer, heart disease, etc.

[travisporter]

Or hundreds of billions of dollars on football, flying cars, or whatever captures peoples' attention.

[spazx]

Or on proxy wars over more oil!

[carapace]

We (USA) could take it out of the defense budget if we tasked the military with climate security.

[allovernow]

When you calculate risk/reward to efficiently allocate resources, you have to effectively estimate probabilities of both.

Yes some predictions are dire but if they have a one in a million chance of happening (for example) then it doesn't make sense to divert funds that could be better spent on more certain problems.