> anyone familiar with complex physical systems will understand that when you add energy to such a system, the effects are often hard to predict
This is something that is very underappreciated. It's entirely possible that the climate becomes chaotic (in a mathematical sense) and there are sudden, drastic changes that cause economic and social devastation.
It seems inevitable that people will be complacent until it's too late.
On the other hand, this energy can also get converted into complexity. It's not like this hasn't happened before (organisms, trees, animals, cities, etc...). So it's possible with this fast increase in energy, we get the SciFi city we have all been dreaming of.
Of course, it's easier for this energy to dissipate as heat and kill us all.
Flipping that around, it seems inevitable that [leftists] will insist on mass collective action based on the predictions of unreliable academics, until the moment they realize those predictions were wrong. Again.
Example: the idea that global warming doesn't cause warming is new. 20 years ago climatologists were telling British people with absolute confidence that by now there'd be no more snow. In the 1960s they were telling people there was a new ice age on the way. Both predictions were dead wrong and have now been white-washed out of existence.
Why is it only conservatives who require that if people claim their understanding of the climate is good enough to predict it decades into the future, they actually be able to do that? Why is it only conservatives who recognize that academia's reputation should suffer if they constantly make aggressive predictions, get it wrong and then pretend it never happened?
> Example: the idea that global warming doesn't cause warming is new. 20 years ago climatologists were telling British people with absolute confidence that by now there'd be no more snow.
The idea that global warming causes local climate shifts, increases extremes, and breaks existing patterns in ways that will sometimes not cause local warming and may even cause local cooling has been a major theme of GW discussions at least as old as the 1980s.
The particular local predictions for Britain may be new, but that its hard to make specific local predictions of the effects is also not a new realization, so I doubt very much that climatologists (as opposed to, say, popular media) were predicting anything of the kind you describe with “absolute confidence”.
>> I doubt very much that climatologists (as opposed to, say, popular media) were predicting anything of the kind you describe with “absolute confidence”.
Here's proof but there's far more where it comes from.
Prediction, March 2000: According to Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia, within a few years winter snowfall will become "a very rare and exciting event". "Children just aren't going to know what snow is," he said.
Reality, March 2023: Met Office weather: Snow could return as fresh -4C blast to hit UK. A return of wintry weather has not been ruled out despite the country now being in spring
Climatologists have a reputation for being always wrong not due to media mis-representation. The media by and large doesn't misrepresent what they're saying. They have that reputation because they keep making stupid predictions with absolute confidence that then don't come true, and they never admit that this has happened even though the archives are full of examples.
It means the same as any other person who says it. "A few", as in, maybe 3 to 5 years. That's why he said children won't know what snow is. If they were small children in 2000 then by 2003 snow is gone, they won't remember it.
But yea, sure, if you want to argue that he wasn't speaking English and that "Children just aren't going to know what snow is" didn't happen then go for it, that'll be amusing to read.
This is something that is very underappreciated. It's entirely possible that the climate becomes chaotic (in a mathematical sense) and there are sudden, drastic changes that cause economic and social devastation.
It seems inevitable that people will be complacent until it's too late.