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It's a difficult nut to crack. How do you get across the severity and imminence without enabling the "the world didn't light on fire when you said it would!" cr

• JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > How do you get across the severity and imminence without enabling the "the world didn't light on fire when you said it would!" crowd Error bars would help. Also, defining what red versus orange means. Are the damage assessments consistent across domains, e.g. should we drop climate change as a priority to focus on novel entities? If the purpose is to prompt policy action, I'd start by constraining the time horizon: probable damage within 10 to 20 years. Then, dollarise it. Give it error bars. Now you have a price tag an activist can talk about when convincing voters to bear a given cost. You also have a device that builds credibility--you can look back and quantify the cost of not mitigating.
  • AnimalMuppet 3y ago
    In fact, you can build a cascading series: If we don't do anything in 10 years, here's the damage, in dollars, with error bars. If we don't in 20 years, here's the damage then. In 30 years, and 50. But the numbers have to be defensible, or they're going to get shredded by people who don't want to do something.
    • AndrewKemendo 3y ago
      People who don’t want to do anything won’t be convinced by data
• AbrahamParangi 3y ago
  You seem to be asking how you can be speak hyperbolically while sounding realistic.