cafeamericainmag.com
There has been a lot of CW discussion on climate change. This is an article written by someone that used to strongly believe in anthropogenic global warming and then looked at all the evidence before arriving at a different conclusion. The articles goes through what they did.
I thought a top-level submission would be more interesting as climate change is such a hot button topic and it would be good to have a top-level spot to discuss it for now. I have informed the author of this submission; they said they will drop by and engage with the comments here!
Jump in the discussion.
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Notes -
Some years ago I would have considered tackling climate change my main political priority. Since then, having watched most developed nations do what looks like everything in their power to actively avoid investing in more nuclear power, I find it hard to care much anymore.
For me, the way nuclear power is handled is a dead give-away that the climate alarmists aren't actually interested in the climate. If CO2 emissions really as as catastrophically dangerous as they are made out to be, then nuclear is the obvious, guaranteed-to-work, 100% solution that would completely have already solved this problem by now.
As in the article: "This is highly relevant because it means our current climate scare is based not on irrefutable scientific evidence but rather on hysteria and alarmist fear-mongering that fifty years of “failed apocalyptic predictions” have failed to abate. This is crucial to understand as it makes it clear that rather than debating how humans should mitigate this alleged impending disaster, the proper focus should be to question why those in power are employing psychological fear tactics to promote taxation, restriction, and degrowth, and why so many intelligent people have uncritically bought into the hysteria when these proposed policies are clearly to their own detriment."
If CO2 emissions really as as catastrophically dangerous as they are made out to be, then nuclear is the obvious, guaranteed-to-work, 100% solution that would completely have already solved this problem by now
Unless the same people also fear nuclear power to roughly the same extent. And unfortunately many people who drive environmental concerns grew up in an era where fear of nuclear power was rampant. The Cuban Missile crisis, Chernobyl, Three Mile Island. In other words if you think A will be a catastrophe and can be solved by B, which will also be a catastrophe then it becomes easy to see why people look for options C through F.
The real test is once those people die/retire/age out of leadership roles will the movement reorient itself.
Same as generals still fighting the last type of war instead of the next one.
Notably, they can of course be wrong about how catastrophic A or B might be, but from direct exposure to very many high level "climate alarmists" it is my opinion they are absolutely sincere in being worried about the climate. They are just also worried about nuclear catastrophes. And a whole bunch of other things. In fact I would say the thing that connects them (or most of them), is they worry way too much about a lot of things.
After all if this fear of climate change is driven by hysteria, what makes you think their other fears are going to be rationally evaluated against climate change in order to solve climate change?
Or perhaps more generally, what makes you think they're even capable of rationally evaluating fears in the first place?
Well, that's the good-faith answer. Yet, it concerns me that the things they appear to be genuinely afraid of also happen to be things that it is in their personal or class interest to be genuinely afraid of, and afraid in such a way that their opponents' good-faith efforts are never good enough for them.
If climate change sheds its master morality baggage and actually threatens to improve life for a change, maybe we'd start accomplishing those goals. Tesla did it, look how successful they are. (Of course, the most statistically worried about climate change also excuse themselves from buying a Tesla because they don't like what Elon says on the Internet- a good faith view of that is hyperconservative fear paralysis... which is why it's odd we consider progressives to be on the left when they're fundamentally an ultraconservative rightist movement specifically because fear dominates their reasoning.)
Some of the alarmists are explicit about their ideological tendencies, see: https://twitter.com/ClimateBen/status/1766859556313841773
"Does capitalism mean fully entering rapid mass extinction in either the 21st or 22nd century?
Yes.
Will humans and the majority of species face mass death or annihilation by 2050- 2150?
Yes.
Are mass media journalists telling us scientists urge economic system change?
No."
And later in the thread: "Abrupt climate change is just one compounding factor in extinction catastrophe. Change this Extinction Economy now while it's still too late to protect species and everyone."
I suspect there's a large overlap between climate alarmism and anti-capitalism.
This is highly dangerous. As the image shows (source: https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-history-methods), the global poverty rate was over 80% in 1800. Today it's less than 20%. Capitalism and the industrial revolution it helped to fuel is the obvious cause of that. Note that modern-day class warriors rail against the inequality of capitalism -- but they leave out the fact that the vast majority of people on the planet are far better off today than 250 years ago.
The dangerous aspect is if they have their way, the systems that enabled this to happen will be reversed and thus we'll head back in the direction of extreme poverty for all.
/images/17133444819677088.webp
vast majority is underestimate, people worse off are tiny % of all population. And they are mostly in places like North Korea where it is caused by not enough capitalism. Or Ukrainian frontline where it can be blamed for many things but surely not capitalism.
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