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> It was difficult enough to get the powers that be to believe even those very conservative predictions – even those were incessantly attacked and/or ignored fo
by webmaven 5y ago
> It was difficult enough to get the powers that be to believe even those very conservative predictions – even those were incessantly attacked and/or ignored for being propaganda, alarmist, unrealistic, bad science, a conspiracy by climate scientists just trying to secure grants…
It was a lost opportunity to shift the Overton window, which led to the moderate — rather than the extreme — projections being labelled as alarmist.
- Sharlin 5y agoYeah, but had there been a loud minority of climate scientists professing less moderate views, then the opponents would have simply retorted "see, they themselves can't even agree on what they think will happen!" And the scientific community was painfully aware that any internal disagreement would be used by the opponents to spread doubt, as seen in the leaked Climategate correspondence. Of course, this call for a united front was then used by the denialists as evidence for their climate conspiracy theory, so it's not like the humanity had any actual chance of winning against itself here. We really done fucked up this time.
- webmaven 5y agoPresumably, that scenario still includes figures advocating complacency, so you're really comparing a situation where opinion is presented as split between complacency and moderation vs complacency, moderation, and alarmism. Both-sideism works in your favor in the latter case, and if someone digs into the numbers a bit more, they would find that the alarmists outnumber the complacents. The only real risk is that the alarmists provoke an "it's already too late to fix anything" response, which I don't think is terribly likely, as there isn't an upper bound on how bad things get until you hit a tipping point of civilizational collapse.