Pirate's Cove

The fallout from the scaremongering NY Magazine article on the Earth soon being to hot to support human life continues. Some, like Grist (which usually does a good job with the fear mongering) says the story was too much fearmongering (even though they do some themselves)

The worst-case climate scenario is very bad indeed. The thing is, even the worst-case scenario is not nearly as bad as Wallace-Wells portrays. (snip)

The problem is, if you’re trying to motivate people, scaring the shit out of them is a really bad strategy.

It’s what the Cult of Climastrology has relied on for decades, and has gotten significantly worse with the rise of all the media outlets.

Kevin Drum isn’t so sure that climate change is all that scary, nor is he sure that scary the bejusus out of people is a good idea. What he does think is a good idea

Pour massive amounts of public money into energy R&D and infrastructure buildout.

Um, surprise? Why don’t Warmists ever want to use their own money? They always want to take it from others. Though, in all fairness, I’d rather use what we do spend on R&D first, make sure it works.

There are plenty more opinions from Warmists, but, here’s the topper from Slate’s Susan Matthews

Alarmism Is the Argument We Need to Fight Climate Change
New York magazine’s global-warming horror story isn’t too scary. It’s not scary enough.

New York’s David Wallace-Wells has a formidable cover story in the magazine this week, “The Uninhabitable Earth,” that dryly details just how bad things could get due to climate change. The answer? Very, very bad. The timeline? Sooner than you think. The instantly viral piece might be the Silent Spring of our time, except it doesn’t uncover shocking new information—it just collects all the terrifying things that were already sitting out there into one extremely terrifying list.

I would have skipped past the 1st paragraph except for one thing: the mention of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. It was based on junk science, and proved deadly. The ‘climate change’ movement is likewise based on junk science, and we’ll see if implementing it turns deadly. It has for birds, so far.

“No matter how well-informed you are, you are surely not alarmed enough,” Wallace-Wells writes, before running through the known science and stats that explain why rising seas, the focus of most of our climate panic, are just the tip of the iceberg—disease, famine, economic panic, and civil unrest are coming, too. An argument for freaking out, his piece has been decried for being too alarmist. Actually, it is not alarmist enough. As I read it in bed at midnight Sunday night, for the first time I started to realize just exactly why climate change might be a reason not to have children—because if those children have children, this could be their world. That’s how close to the edge we are.

Doomed!

I understand the desire to steer away from hopelessness, doom, and despair, which Mann posits to be antithetical to rational and bold action. Climate change is a uniquely difficult problem specifically because addressing it requires humans to be selflessly interested in the long term, which is neither natural nor easy. But, contrary to the belief perpetuated by a lot of the criticism of this piece, addressing climate change does not rely on people being psychologically self-possessed enough to freely give up meat and airplane rides for the greater good. There is no amount of individual good intention that can solve this massive, structural problem in enough time to have an impact. What we need is leaders who will take this problem seriously. We need it yesterday. And the right way to get there is to tell people the truth about the future and implore them to vote for and insist on a better one.

So, forced compliance via Big Government? Shocking! Then we get some whines about income inequality, Donald Trump, the elites, ending with

We don’t need to guard against alarmism, against depression, against anger, against despair when it comes to climate change. Sure, the hopelessness that accompanies pondering our fate might depress people out of recycling their water bottles or switching their light bulbs. That doesn’t matter. If it also scares people into actually taking this issue seriously at the ballot box, the trade-off will be well worth it. Because the ballot box is where it matters. If we force the issue—if we elect people who care about the survival of all humans rather than just a few—then we might have a shot of preventing the hellscape Wallace-Wells has outlined.

If you don’t want that outcome, we need to start by being more alarmed.

This hasn’t worked for 25+ years, and it will certainly turn more people off. Really, as stated so many times, ‘climate change’ tends to come in last or next to last in polls on the issues that people care about. It’s low hanging fruit. And, as Instapundit likes to write “I’ll believe it’s a crisis when the people who say it’s a crisis start acting like it’s a crisis.” In other words, practice what they preach.

It is interesting how this all comes back to political power and money, isn’t it?