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?
What about it?
I agree. However, what you describe in your examples are not the worst case scenarios, or even of equal severity.
To be clear, I do believe in anthropomorphic climate change, but in a vacuum the situation is not as “sensible” as you say.
A “few” percentage points of growth means misery for many.
It’s easy to be blithe about a few percentage points coming out of your bonus if you already live comfortably in the first world, but a few percentage points of economic growth is life or death for millions of people.
Don't forget about the benefits to average healthspan from not breathing in exhaust/coal fumes. And the unknown benefits from opening up a new technological frontier that has previously been closed off due to the high energy density of fossil fuels.
I have not seen any evidence of a "large percentage of the population becoming useless" due to fear of climate change.
Can you provide a citation?
I have seen people with a basic background concern about climate change, and some people have more of it than others, but I don't see a "large percentage" of people becoming useless.
People have lots of fears. Some even more more pressing than climate change. Human beings are able to handle and process many different fears of varying intensities simultaneously, and have for thousands of years.
I have also not seen any information that the psychological fear of climate change is worse than actual climate change. One provokes level of fear in a subset of the population. The other will kill us all.
Perhaps the best way to fix those psychological fears in people is to fix the climate so they don't have to worry about it?
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.
- There's no climate change
- Climate change is okay and has no impact
- Climate change exists but it's due to natural causes
- Climate change exists but it's due to natural causes and its impacts are small
- Climate change exists but its impacts are good for us
- Climate change exists but we will adapt
- Climate change exists and its the activists' fault we didn't act because they scared us with their doomsday predictions
- Climate change exists and we shouldn't talk about it because it's scary and scared people are not productive members of society <- you are here
I suppose the real reason we're not tackling it full on is that it won't be a few percentage points.
Let's face it, the cost of abruptly stopping fossil fuel dependence would be high. Countries going bankrupt, people dying due to high fuel costs, enormous investments diverting money from other necessities.
It may well be necessary, and better than the alternative! But we tried the "just cycle a little bit more" approach and it made next to no dent to CO2 emissions. To really tackle it, we'd need to reinvent the global economy.
Just pointing out that the deeper issues often gets lost in the geopolitics. When it progressively makes people's lives worse or exponentially increases debts, it really all leads to the same outcomes in the end.
Of course, that if you know nothing and believe in no one, so you don't have a clue of what future may come. We advanced a bit since astrology and reading tea leaves, we have better tools to make predictions, and they work well enough to base our current civilization on that, and, don't know, be afraid because taking a plane, entering a skyscraper, or taking a medicine. And those tools are the ones saying which alternative is the right one there.