this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2023
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It's a very lucrative industry now. People are making fortunes and careers on climate change. You can't expect honesty or clear information on the back of that. It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.
My take is that a) man-made climate change is happening, and b) it's not nearly as bad as alarmists claim. [The global average temperature is projected to increase by 2-4C over the next 80 years. I'm sorry, but that's just not an "emergency." You know what is an emergency? The 4.6 We should, immediately, work to make energy cheaper and more abundant for more people, even if it increases our carbon output. Saving lives today is obviously much more important than potentially saving lives 100 years from now.
I respectfully disagree.
At our current trajectory there will be mass death and significant swathes of the planet will simply be uninhabitable.
The view that we should release more carbon than we already are doing now is, in my opinion, reckless and selfish.
I’ll have to find the source later, but I read somewhere that each 1 degree Celsius rise in temperature reduces overall crop yields by 10%. Also, tropical forests that rely on high humidity environments will start drying up causing drastic ecological and an increase in fires. Yes, the fear mongering sells news, but that doesn’t mean you can write off climate change as a big deal.
That sounds on the high side, so I'd want to read a source before I accept it. Let's say it's true for a moment, and crop yields decline by 20-40% over the next 80 years. Take a look at global wheat yields over time. The use of technology to improve yields has resulted in explosive growth to output. Our continued improvements for the next 80 years will more than make up for even a 40% reduction.
I must be clear: I am well aware that there will be consequences to a 2-4C increase in temperature. I'm claiming that those consequences are not as bad as the millions of people dying each year at present because they lack access to cheap energy.