Though I'm one to question a lot of things and this is my 2 cents. How the hell we know this current changes are completely abnormal? I read about some weird climate anomalies centuries ago and of course there's a lot of evidence that current events are completely abnormal but one question always come to my mind.
What if we're wrong? What if we're being too cooky thinking that by having looked into some evidence that made sense, we're not completely wrong here and current events are just part of a cycle in the planet weather?
Again, I'm questioning but I don't need you guys to present me the proof, I'm aware of it. Just questioning if we're not wrong all along and are here destroying our mental health for nothing. Seems like even by the 1940s standards our generation is being constantly swarmed with problems which we can't fix, which are causing all sort of mental issues due to the complete stress we live in.
This being said, the switch from fossil fuels should be done ASAP, even if we're wrong and it's not causing issues in the environment, they are for sure causing health issues.
That is an excellent question to ask.
If climate change is not a thing or not man-made, the worst outcome would be missing a few percentage points of economic growth by unnecessarily restricting energy sources.
If climate change is a thing and it is man-made, the worst outcome would be everything that is described by the IPCC, which is bad for society as a whole.
So, just pondering the worst-case scenario is enough to give you an idea of a sensible course of action.
This is a bit reductive of what is happening. How about the psychological damage done by the fear mongering caused by these type of news regarding climate change?
It’s a product of the information environment, not the information itself.
And in light of the magnitude of the risk of getting this wrong, future generations will benefit in either case - either because we did what we could to improve things, or because we were the unfortunate generation that got lucky enough to be the ones having to interpret the data and suffer through some anxiety so the next generation doesn’t have to.
Imagine two future headlines:
“21st century scientists were on the right track, but society failed to act in time due to a drastic pullback in climate related reporting caused by worry that such reporting was too upsetting for people to handle. 6B perished in the aftermath due to mass starvation and forced migration.”
“21st century scientists had the unfortunate job of coming face to face with apparently cataclysmic data, without enough information about earth’s long term cycles to know that this was inevitable”.
Bottom line: the cost of incorrectly taking no action is so much higher than taking unnecessary action that it seems preferable to find ways to manage the downsides of acting than to hope there are no downsides of not acting.