zlacker

This reminds me of the "population bomb" of the 1970's. There was a scientific view at the time that the world would become overpopulated due to the rapid growth in places like India and China. That in turn would cause mass death and starvation world wide. This view became mainstream enough that the US and the World Bank pressured India into a mass sterilization program[1]. By the end over 8 million Indians were surgically sterilized, many against their will.

Of course the population bomb turned out not to be real. Third-world birth rates drop as they grow economically. But on the path to preventing the perceived apocalypse we imposed massive harm on millions of people.

The real problem was that part of the scientific community were so confident in their ability to correctly model extremely complex systems that they were willing to do incredible harm "for the greater good". But it turns out that modeling complex systems, especially ones that have never been observed (such as a population "bomb") is really hard. They were not wrong about the data (population was growing at an unprecedented rate). But they were wrong about how that would impact the future.

This has a lot of parallels to climate change. Climate is an incredibly complex system that we have just recently started to study. We have never before observed runaway anthropomorphic climate change (obviously) so all these predictions are based on our ability to model this system. There really isn't any dispute that the global climate is warmer then it was a few decades ago, but what that actually means for the future has big error bars. This could be another "population bomb" type scenario.

But again, it might not be. The science strongly suggest that climate change is a very real and preventable phenomenon. Scientists have been right about the global harm of many other industrial activities (such as leaded gasoline or CFC's). But I am wary of people who say we need to ignore the harm of climate related policy actions because the IPCC future is "inevitable" if we don't. I am also skeptical of our ability to get the international community united enough to actually have a meaningful impact.

[1]https://www.asianstudies.org/publications/eaa/archives/india...

>>celeri+(OP)
This is actually a great view on the matter and the same concern I was trying to express, maybe poorly.

>>celeri+(OP)
(I’m also not a climate change denier) kinda the same reason it’s funny to me how not many economists are disgustingly rich despite supposedly being able to make scientific sense out of economic mechanics.

>>celeri+(OP)
"Population Bomb" was not a scientific consensus at any time. It was controversial, at best, in its day and has always faced criticism. Ehrlich was a scientist but not of the type qualified to hold forth on the subject, and he did not perform research that would have strengthened his projections, none of which came to pass. His book is pop culture, not science.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Population_Bomb#Criticisms