I'm with you, you are far from alone. My own thoughts are to ignore the pessimism and what others are/are not doing. As an individual, this is the only way I can defeat the prisoner dilemma. In addition to your suggestions, I would also say we need to learn to bring this topic up in all areas of life e.g. around the office, family gatherings etc. Not talking about uncomfortable topics may end up killing us, and our children. I want to be a part of that 3.5% :D
Ouch. I read this and I am completely confused about what to do with the rest of the time I have left. Should I even bother with my current career in tech, or would it be better to quit it and do something that could have even a slight impact now?
These articles are great, but preaching to the choir. What should any of us do? I'm seriously and sincerely asking. Are there any suggestions, from a personal stand point i.e. excluding a completely new economic model and government structure? Is it to drive less and cut out meat? (done) Buy less stuff? Support the right organizations and political candidates?
What if one is doing all of those things already, now what? Just sit here and watch our homes go up in flames as the entire place becomes a desert? Some actionable things would be great to have.
"I read this and I am completely confused about what to do with the rest of the time I have left."
It is a grave life error to assign excessive likelihood to the doomsayers. I've been reading about inevitable doom for 25 years now. Some of what I read as a kid dated to the 60s and the guaranteed dates of inevitable doom had already passed by the time I read them in the early 90s.
Even assuming they are completely 100% right about the problems, which is frankly a big assumption, they rarely, if ever, even remotely account for the fact that people and the economy change in reaction to problems.
Also, consider the possibility that this feeling of hopelessness is something that perhaps somebody wants to instill in you. Why? Who benefits? Are their hands as clean as you suppose? Are you sure? I'm a big fan of "follow the money"; where most people fuck that up is that they only want to follow the money sometimes, when it suits them. Nope... always follow it. "Follow the money" is almost always used wrong; you don't need it to debunk the people you already don't trust, you need it to vet the people you do. Doomsaying has been exceedingly profitable over the past ~60 years. (It's been profitable even farther back than that, but mass market doomsaying really took off somewhere around then, which is where the real money is.) Do not forget to take that into account.
(Also, as my post implies, don't assume I'm speaking just to the particular doom de jour, about which you might still have emotional reactions. I'm talking about nuclear war, population bombs, a multitude of claims we're running out of some resource, trash management issues, a wide variety of eschatological claims, all sorts of things I've read in the last 30 years. You may say "But jerf, some of those are still problems and may be problems in the future" and I say, I agree. I often like to say "Stand up. Point in a random direction. You are pointing at a problem." There are always problems and always will be problems. But we're not talking about problems... we're talking about doom. The doom has not happened. I believe fully in environmental problems both in the present and the future. I do not anywhere near fully believe in inevitable doom.)
It's tricky when a preponderance of evidence and theory tells us that the lag time on the signal is several decades but human generations are also measured in decades. It doesn't matter how strong your negative feedback is if the system it's controlling is in thermal runaway by the time you apply a corrective signal.
Maybe we can bandaid or mitigate the worst effects for some people. Probably richer people. But just see Harvey and wildfires and droughts for strong evidence that we will not do anything whatsoever even when cities are being destroyed by inaction.
Harvey? The hurricane that was the first to make landfall after 12 years of no hurricanes? After we were repeatedly explicitly promised increased hurricanes because of global warming? The one that Wikipedia lists as merely a category 4 and looms large in your mind simply because of where it happened to hit?
Did anyone ever admit their predictions about increased hurricanes during those 12 years were wrong? I never saw it. You just remember the images, not the 12 years of no images.
And I remember wildfires in California when I was a kid, too. Except now probably about 10 million people live closer to them and like to build houses in the way of them. (Oh, and let's not forget how many of those fires turn out to be less about "global warming" and more about arson. After a certain point, dry is just dry.)
This is part of why I really can't get myself too worked up over Certain Environmental Doom... it's always people sharing emotionally vivid anecdotes instead of data. When I look at the statistical data, it isn't much to get worked up over. The IPCC warming estimates have already been revised down to the point that it's hardly worth worrying about; it's not as if "zero degrees of change in a century" was ever on the table.
It's the emotionally charged anecdotes that get you worked up and feeling doomed and hopeless. Again, who benefits? Sure isn't you.
I'm personally more interested in the ocean plastic problem than global warming at the moment. Global warming has really failed to pan out as a threat, in my opinion.
But then, bear in mind once again I'm brushing 40. If you're twenty-something and inclined to pull your hair out over what I'm saying here, think about where you would be with another 15 years of your current level of concern, but if you looked outside on the same world you do now. I see anecdotes and anecdotes and anecdotes about how horrible climate change is, but the data isn't anywhere near as scary as the news stories being written... in fact I see the news stories getting scarier even as the data gets less scary to me. In fact it's downright bizzare to compare the predictions made now nearly twenty years ago to what actually happened, and to read all these stories that are written as if the predictions made twenty years ago actually happened, or perhaps even happened worse than predicted, instead of being rather a ways off the mark.
Personally, I'd probably actually be more concerned if I read a story that basically said "Here's the predictions made 20 years ago. Here's why they didn't pan out. Here's the models that we made 10 years ago that fixed the problem and evidence that they've done a great job predicting the last ten. Here's why those models are showing problems 20 years down the road and why this time we actually know what we are talking about." But that's not what I read. What I see is just screeching panic, and most damningly, denial that any error was ever made when it is plainly obvious that errors were made, and that IPCC report estimates have in fact been trending down and not up. When no error can ever be admitted, it's clearly a political process, not a scientific one, because it's in politics you can't ever admit you were wrong, not even a little, with the only error you're allowed to admit to is that you didn't realize how right you were at the time. I don't recommend driving yourself into anxiety and insanity for a process so obviously filled with politics.
And I remember wildfires in California when I was a kid, too. Except now probably about 10 million people live closer to them and like to build houses in the way of them. (Oh, and let's not forget how many of those fires turn out to be less about "global warming" and more about arson. After a certain point, dry is just dry.)
The problem isn't what sets the fire. It's that the heat dries out the forests, making any fires larger and more devastating. For example: you can light a fire pretty much anywhere in an Eastern forest, because they're sufficiently wet that a fire won't grow very large. You could even do that a few decades ago in the West. But try that now in California, you and could start a thousands-acre conflagration so hot it kills the soil and doesn't burn out until literally all available fuel has been used up.
Did anyone ever admit their predictions about increased hurricanes during those 12 years were wrong? I never saw it. You just remember the images, not the 12 years of no images.
There have been way more hurricanes. Luckily for us, the oceans are very large, and most of those hurricanes did not make landfall.
And no, I'm the same age as you. I do not remember nearly as many devastating hurricanes in the first 20 years of my life, whereas in the second half I've seen Katrina, Harvey, Maria, Sandy, saw California in drought for what, a decade? I have personally seen the glaciers in New Zealand that have receded by miles and miles. And the temperature record is undeniable. And the ocean temperature measurements. And the ocean acidification measurements. And the ice cap melt measurements.
The linked report, by the way, suggests that while the current trends are in line with increases that actual statistically significant diversions from usual won't be detectable until the possible to see until the end of the century (for Hurricanes). Of course by then the temperature will be 3C or so hotter, and lots of other things will be impacted more directly sooner like crop yields, fish populations, and other things.
The problem with this thinking is that, as I said, the timescale that responses show up is on par with the human life span. This is a huge problem for a species with massive future-discounting built into our DNA. No, we don't see these things (strongly) yet. That's not the point, the point is that the impact on our lives to change this is shockingly small compared to the enormous and extremely likely risks of doing nothing. The timescale might be wrong, that wouldn't be surprising. But given a choice between "do something that might not be needed" and "do nothing until it's too late even if it is needed" shouldn't be hard.
Current technology can remove CO2 from the atmosphere for $90-230 per ton. That's with current technology to capture it from literally the air.
A gallon of gas emits 8.9kg of CO2. So capturing that emission with current technology costs $2.25 per gallon. If that sounds expensive, compare that to the further collapse of fish stocks, massive water and food insecurity globally forcing mass migrations, and entire cities being flooded. Suddenly that sounds a lot more reasonable.
Anyway. I don't think your attitude is a good one. Switching to a carbon neutral economy is just frankly not nearly as costly as people seem to think, and the risks of not doing it are way too big to ignore. Of course, people with this attitude that we shouldn't act until proof of specific harm that impacts them specifically is available... not going to lie, I think that's a huge moral failing.
If you want to believe in Inevitable Doom, go nuts.
Possibly literally.
But if that's how you want to play things, I probably can't stop you. But at least I tried.
It's not a healthy way to live, and I don't think it's one particularly backed by the evidence. In terms of threats I think are likely to impact me over the next twenty years, I still rate "governments instituting stupid economic policies" well over "environmental catastrophe". You look around the world and that's something that happens a lot more often than, say, a port closing or a city being abandoned because of rising seas. There's a nontrivial chance they'll both combine and we'll get stupid economic decisions made because of unjustified panic about environmental issues.
Well, you're in a combative mood, judging from all the replies you're posting, but I'll risk it.
> It's not a healthy way to live
Oh, agreed. Trust me. I've been neck deep in this one. It'll warp your mind. Doesn't mean it's not true. Just like the Sun blowing up to a red giant in 5 billion years. Gonna happen. Profound, devastating climate change has already begun. Human civilization is remarkably fragile and will teeter and crash in the next 50-200 years.
> I don't think it's one particularly backed by the evidence.
Well, in the same way that the Sun shows no current signs of blowing up into a red giant the size of Earth's orbit, sure. But I get the impression you're not able (or willing) to run a few of the very obvious scenarios forward in your mind. This is reality. It's coming. Maybe you're like me and will be lucky to live out your life in relative luxury before most of the damage comes home to roost. Great. I'm hoping for 40-50 more years of merrymaking, too. But make no mistake, we are totally fucked.
But then you go on to say,
> In terms of threats I think are likely to impact me over the next twenty years, I still rate "governments instituting stupid economic policies"
And that's my thunder button right there. For fuck's sake, you gotta give up this idea that this mythical "economy" and "economical policies" is all there is. Like your entire life is driven by the stock market or your ability to get bananas in January. Look at the Earth. Fuck your bananas in January and your backyard pool. Fuck your manicured lawn. Seriously. 7 billion humans thinking and acting exactly like this is how we get here, and then you have the gall to moan about "stupid economic decisions made because of unjustified panic about environmental issues."
Fuuuuck. This is what so frustrating, because it is just impossible to get through your economic interest to make you see that hey, we are deep shit right now.
In your original post you listed out a bunch of issues that never amounted to anything.
Did it occur to you that they never amounted to anything because people did shit about them? It wasn't the economy that stopped the Ozone hole from expanding. It wasn't technological innovation that brought down the Soviet Union and ended Red Scare.
Did it occur to you that just because you live an insulated life, that these disasters are actually happening right now?
It doesn't seem like you're as bad as a denialist, but you're worse than a geopolitical isolationist. You're an individual isolationist and your mantra seems to be, "Fuck you, I've got mine".
"Did it occur to you that they never amounted to anything because people did shit about them?"
Then you've admitted the only point I care about here, which is that getting personally panicky about those things would have been a waste of time. Doom is not certain. People do in fact do things in reaction to problems.
"Did it occur to you that just because you live an insulated life, that these disasters are actually happening right now?"
Read what I wrote again with an eye towards answering those questions, because the answer is there. The Earth is positively saturated with problems... but that's not actually a new state of affairs, despite what youth may think and/or certain people may have told you.
You are establishing that problems exist. That is not the question I am answering. I am answering is doom inevitable? And the answer is simple: No. Do not live hopelessly. Do not plan for your future life as if we're all going to be dead in 10 years inevitably because of environmental disaster. There are many disasters in your future with non-zero probability, but living as if they have already occurred just moves them into the present with 100% probability. That's not a win.
In terms of reading my mind, you'd be doing better off if you first read my text, instead of what you assume my text is going to say. Or trying to figure out which bogeyman to associate me with so you can stop thinking and start emoting. That's not a healthy psychological pattern. Who taught you to do that? What benefit do they get from it? Are you benefiting from it? (Hint: No.)
I guess we need to define what you mean by "personally panicky". I read you saying that a person shouldn't be personally panicky as "a person should not worry." That's where my annoyance comes from.
The grandparent comment's Fight or Flight instinct should be going off at ALL mentions of AGW. They need to be thinking about the next decades of their life with AGW in mind. If they live in Florida, they should seriously consider not living in Florida. If they have a house that's near a beach they need to leave. If they don't live in the developing world, they need to figure out how to get to the developed world ASAP.
You're right that nobody should be brought into a crippling depression because of global warming, but we're far past being optimistic about it.
Also, your "who is making money off your panic" thread is stupid and you should stop. People panic for a variety of reasons and only a small minority are "because panic was induced by a second party".
There is an inevitable (if nothing is done), slowly unfolding tragedy in motion right now. You are the one that is reacting irrationally, in spite of the number of words you've thrown at the problem.
Your sentiment really embodies the worst kind of free-rider: "you shouldn't worry, because other people have solved problems for me in the past".
This is a terribly uncharitable (downright hostile) interpretation of jerfs’ actually thoughtful response.
It’s not about free-riding. The grandparent posted, “I read this and I am completely confused about what to do with the rest of the time I have left. Should I even bother with...” and there’s a lot in jerfs’ response which I hope GP reads and reflects on.
The world is saturated with imminent disaster. Perhaps the entire universe hangs on a thread.
The way we (humans) get out of it, and they way we always have, is not nihilistic defeatism. In the face of continuous doomsday prophecy, the optimal individual response is absolutely to tune it completely out and focus on becoming the best you can be at that thing that you do.
And throwaway5752 you trying to moralize that jerfs is “the worst kind of free-rider” is an asinine ad hominem attack that I’d say only amplifies the underlying truth of how important it is to tune out voices like yours.
There still are solutions. They, however, require that the environmental movement accept large scale engineering efforts aimed at adjusting our environment. Which runs counter to their instincts.
"accept large scale engineering efforts aimed at adjusting our environment."
While these are interesting technologies, it's very difficult to see how they make sense economically. The cost/benefit ratio is invariably much worse than simply investing in emissions reductions.
If we have $X to invest in climate mitigation, it's always going to be better to spend it on technologies that reduce carbon emissions: replacing fossil-fuel power plants, electrification of transport, etc. To my knowledge there is no technology that removes a ton of carbon from the atmosphere that comes anywhere close to being competitive with what it costs to not emit that ton of carbon in the first place.
Of course, the day may come when all the easy carbon reductions have been made. If the climate is still not stabilising at that point, then we can start looking at all the climate engineering mega-projects.
First of all, emission reductions are not sufficient. The CO2 already emitted is enough to create a mass extinction from ocean acidification.
Secondly the two techniques that I pointed to are, today, cheaper than emissions reductions.
Third, the cost of other mitigations is improving over time as the price of renewable power (particularly solar) drops. So even approaches that are not currently cost-effective may be in the near future.
If you are in the United States, participate in Republican primaries in support of Republican politicians who acknowledge that climate change is a problem that we cannot ignore and need to start seriously acting on.
There are in fact Republican politicians who support effective measures to address climate change that are compatible with traditional Republican market-based, conservative principles, such as a revenue neutral carbon tax, but they are greatly outnumbered by the ones who think climate change is fake or is just natural cycles that will swing the other way on their own and that we cannot influence anyway.
Don’t give up on tech. It’s technology that offers the best hope of solving these problems.
Consider applying your skills to the renewable energy sector, companies working on transport electrification, and other “clean tech” sectors. These are exciting growth industries and you’ll be making a difference.
I go through cycles of being horribly depressed about the climate, and about mine and my family's future. In fact, I'm not even going to read this article because I know it'll set me off. I've learned that the only way to cope is to do everything I can personally (eat less meat, drive less, work from home, buy second hand
, save energy, vote green, encourage my children and family and those around me to do the same) and then basically just get on with life and enjoy it as much as possible. If the worst happens, there's nothing we can do to prepare, not really. If some moonshot magical tech saves the day there's not much we can do to help or hinder that either. Focus on being the best person you can be, be a force for good, live life and appreciate what you have right now. Soak up fresh air and culture. If the world is consumed by fire in the next 50 years you'll be glad you did. And if it isn't, you'll still be glad.
evangelize in high birthrate countries things like contraception and encourage education especially of women. The fewer people destroying virgin forests and becoming western style consumers the lesser the better for environmental health.
An earth of 7.5 billion is more sustainable than an earth of 10 billion. 7.5 will live better lives than a world of 10, given sociopolitical realities.
I like the idea of helping with education and stuff, but why not instead help them develop clean energy?
I’m just REALLY not a fan of the “can’t let the 3rd world have so many people and then develop to 1st world standards” thing. It may technically help the problem, but it feels like soft racism and proto-eugenicism, at least from the perspective of people living in those countries. It gives me the creeps, although I’m sure that’s not your intention.
Also, I’m convinced that the main way to solve these problems is human ingenuity. And that can’t just include people in the Western world.
Third world countries are going to become first world countries, barring as disaster. When they do, they'll use a lot more resources per capita, but their population growth will drop dramatically. Switching them over sooner is a boon for the environment.
Keeping people poor or would be a soft racism/proto-eugenicism, but reduce child mortality and empower women with contraception (as an option they can choose, not pushed coercive) are pretty unambiguously good. I mostly donate to the Against Malaria Foundation both as my anti-poverty charity and my pro-environment charity. They're rated well on effectiveness.
I haven't done much research into highly-effective charities that provide contraception or related educational materials, but https://www.thelifeyoucansave.org/causes/women-charities has some that seem relevant. Women's rights in general is usually a pretty good proxy for both "let women not have babies when they don't want to" and "give women options for fulfilling lives other than just having babies".
Your comment mentions its own fatal flaw: "becoming western style consumers". From what we've seen in the last hundred years, that's strongly positively correlated with (and probably causes) decreasing birthrates. The only other broadly successful way to decrease birthrates was to make it the law, and the one country that did that has abandoned it because of the negative economic effects of too-low birthrates.
You don't throw your foe to the ground with brute force alone. You take him off-balance, and move in with good timing and technique.
If your goal is solving climate change, well, the leverage isn't really in the technical solution, but in the political economy. We need a redesign. That's problem one.
But if it's the power structure that needs changing, what affects it? Knowledge. Signalling. Valuation. And then you get into things that you can potentially change as a tech worker, by pushing for information systems that change our valuation metrics to match a philosophy of sustainability. And that positions actors who wish to take sustainable actions to have the leverage to realize it.
That, I think, is the trick to feeling OK about it. At the end of the day, it's a war fought in an abstract, everyday sense: Build up your sense of morality and build your career around those principles. You might not be the hero, but you won't be the villain.
Improvise, adapt, overcome. Death is a natural part of life. Civilizations die too. It all happened before, and if we are as inventive as I think it will happen again in the distant future.
> Are there any suggestions, from a personal stand point i.e. excluding a completely new economic model and government structure?
You've gone wrong at the very start. This isn't a problem that can be solved on an individual level, and the sad truth is that we do, in fact, need a new economic model. The sooner we own up to that the sooner we can move on with building it.
As far as I can tell, we are reasonably certain that the effects of climate change will be very bad. It’s hard to say exactly what will happen, though.
The truly apocalyptic predictions are just not very likely. We are not going to be boiled alive or turn into Venus or whatever. It’s not going to get so hot that all plant matter catches on fire.
No scientist is predicting that "all plant matter will catch on fire". In fact I've never heard anyone predict that.
If we do nothing, within the next 80 years large parts of the currently inhabited planet will be uninhabitable by humans, however. That's a sort of apocalypse. It's also the consensus view of scientists who study the global pollution epidemic.
I would bet you and I evaluate the problem similarly, I think there are remote but plausible scenarios that are almost intolerably bad (and these become likely if we keep polluting).
But there are left-leaning but not scientifically literate people who honestly believe most life on Earth is already doomed.
This obviously leads to despair in their political thinking and personal lives. I’ve even heard of people contemplating suicide.
I don’t think this is warranted given what we know and the uncertainties involved. Humanity still has a future worth living for even in the most frightening scenarios.
You can read through https://www.drawdown.org/solutions check what you can do yourself and talk to your peers and your political representatives to bring about collective action.
Perhaps the memoirs of terminal cancer patients would be instructive. However, they benefit from frequentist statistics. We've only got Bayes for our experiment.
Even if the math ends up that we are indeed doomed, this type of behavior is not aligned with the human spirit. If we get lung cancer from smoking, we can learn from it, defy it, and /stop smoking/. Or we can become the vice incarnate, and die with the smug satisfaction that we were right because we gave no hope. I want to spend the rest of my life on a planet struggling to survive, not partying to death.
Climate change is one of the reasons we're not having kids. In part because they would have had a very bad life, but also because it's the best for the planet.
Reducing consumption of resources is not working, so we should start thinking about controlling population growth.
> We are far away from global overpopulation. Unless people insist on fossil fuel, waste of resources and animal products as food.
You are technically right, of course, but if humans were rational creatures we would have acted on climate change when the evidence was presented to the world.
As an individual, you are powerless to control population growth. If you decide not to have kids, the world will get filled with the descendants of other people. The descendants of those other people will probably care less about what happens to the environment than your descendants would.
Dealing with the issues of the future will require collective action. In order for that collective action to take place, people will need to vote for it. Having kids means more people to vote for the things you think need to be voted for (since they will share your genetics and you will heavily influence their environment).
You're still pretending like your kids or those other peoples' kids might get together and fix climate change. I'm saying it's too late for that.
Having kids is just condemning them to live in a world ravaged by famine, war and drought. Maybe you're fine with that because you believe on some philosophical level that any life is preferable to never having lived at all, but that's not self-evident.
Black Americans are living proof that a lot of people thought a life of slavery was worth living, despite it's utter terribleness. I think it’s a good bet that living in a world with global warming is better than slavery.
Sorta, but quality of life is subjective. A poor person might be happy and not mind their kids growing up poor. A rich person fearing poverty might have a different opinion.
I don't believe the CO2 levels we currently have (and are projected to have) in the atmosphere is a real threat. I don't believe the doomsday scenarios, apparently caused through cow farts and burning natural gas or from combustion engines. Energy must be expended to release CO2, and the energy is almost 0 in comparison to the energy needed to raise sea levels by say, 10 feet. We are talking millions of nuclear bombs worth of energy needed to accomplish that. There is something off with this. I don't believe the tiny amount of CO2 in our atmosphere will enable the sun to heat the planet to the doomsday levels. Predictions were made since the 80s, 90s, 00's that said our coastal cities should be literally destroyed by now... except that they aren't.
There are a lot of people who stand to profit from the climate change lobby: professors, alternate energy producers, politicians, government, media. They all want money invested in THEIR pet projects. And conveniently, it serves as a great distraction from issues on the horizon that WILL have a guaranteed negative affect on your children's quality of life, but I wont get into that, since what I'm writing is divisive enough as it is.
When it comes to the climate, you will be fine, we will be fine, our kids will be fine, the sky will not fall, the seas will not swallow up our cities (excluding regular weather), America will not become a desert (unless that super-volcano blows). It is sensationalism.
You seem to have this all figured out then, so let me ask, approximately what point beyond your retirement will all of this happen? And I say "beyond your retirement" because that is the time you will probably give me, a time you won't have to worry about anyone taking you to task on your faulty science.
We have reason to believe it's happening now! Besides the AGW signal in the temperature spread, there's now a AGW signal in hurricane behavior and precipitation patterns. It's happening now!
That's the point of the article! Did you even read it?
There are two claims here (ice caps melt + NYC underwater).
I don't think either is even something claimed by the movie, which is a movie. And it's certainly not peer-reviewed science. (Reference for ice caps claim: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ice-caps-melt-gore-2014/, and note, "caps" as you wrote it would imply the entire Antarctic was melting by 2012, which is of course crazy.)
There is no proof humans are causing doomsday levels of climate change through CO2 emissions (literal plant fertilizer, the shit I brew and inject into my fish tank to grow plants). What is demonstrable in a lab is going to be much harder to prove for a whole planet. People should not just accept what these people say as gospel, we have had 30-40 years of doomsday warnings from these people and nothing, absolutely nothing has happened. In addition, we as humans will not be stuck burning CO2 forever, eventually Nuclear and/or Fusion will be perfected to a point that there will be no going back to burning dinosaur oil for fuel.
> There is no proof humans are causing doomsday levels of climate change through CO2 emissions
Not true at all. We have plenty of evidence that humans are causing the rise of C02 emissions. Just simply look at the C14 (Carbon 14) and C12/13 (Carbon 12 and Carbon 13) ratios in the atmosphere. These give a clear signal what is causing the rise of carbon and where the carbon is coming from.
> People should not just accept what these people say as gospel, we have had 30-40 years of doomsday warnings from these people
Yes, and right now, the predictions from the credible scientists are showing to be true. Their predictions were not end of the world in 30-40 years, but we would start to see the effects of climate change, and we are starting to see the effects of climate change.
We've actually had more than 100 years of doomsday warnings, that doesn't mean "nothing happened" if each warning is for a specific set of dates. If I say, "There will be a fire in your house in one year" and then in six months I say, "There will be a fire in your house in half-a-year" that doesn't mean my prediction should be devalued.
Re: Alternative energy: It doesn't matter if fusion/nuclear/any renewable is "perfected" if Carbon Dioxide is at such high levels that every air conditioning unit needs a CO2 scrubber attached because outdoor the concentration reaches 1000ppm and people's brains literally start to get dumber.
> What is demonstrable in a lab is going to be much harder to prove for a whole planet
So what you're saying is that the proof that we have in labs isn't good enough for you?
> we have had 30-40 years of doomsday warnings from these people and nothing, absolutely nothing has happened.
What do you classify as nothing? We've shown that the ice caps are melting [0], that temperatures are increasing rapidly across the globe [1], sea walls are being built to stop cities from flooding [2] [3].
The problem with stating and imagining things in terms of binary outcomes is you can't have a reasonable argument about anything.
Most of what is written about Global warming are events that will unfold over long periods of time, but nevertheless should the situation continue, they will eventually come to pass.
