Thanks for the link (I will read it shortly), but I was specifically referring to folks who go around spreading the "OMG, climate change - we're all doomed!" mantra, which is borderline psychotic thinking. But it's basically one ("Repent ye, for the end is nigh!") which has historically been quite effective, as thousands of years of fear-based religious-type dogma will attest.
Frankly, at this point I'm not sure what I'm more puzzled by: that so many people seem to be falling for this stuff, or that more people aren't calling it out for what it is.
PS: Oops! Turns out that I already read this long ago (I thought it sounded kind of familiar), but I may read it again just for laughs. Even though the story has a "JUL 20, 2018" date on it, it's actually several years old now. Places like Esquire must be getting kind of desperate if they're recycling old stories like this one.
"This story was published in the August 2015 issue of Esquire."
Ok I think I got what you meant - yes, there are some people who see the headlines and ONLY the headlines. That’s something that applies to laymen- despair in the experts and scientists themselves ? That’s unheard of. And this isn’t the only article or source.
I’m not sure what you mean by “calling this stuff out.”
We are going to see the barrier reef die in our life time. Even the weakest carbon targets have been ignored and world consensus has failed.
And this is before Most of the developing world has come online, so human consumption is not even close to its peak.
We are already seeing displacement, and fish stocks world wide are plummeting.
Look no one believed 2008 was coming, because the economy is a complex system which looked to be fine.
The environment is the same. Eventually there’s going to be a failure cascade. The depth and natural complexity of it is being hollowed out, or overwhelmed.
Oh wow, looky here! Yet another reef system out there which scientists didn't even know existed. Now I half-way expect them to say (as they have about some other recently discovered reefs) that this reef shouldn't even be able to exist at that location. Imagine that: scientists' current understanding of reef ecology may be woefully lacking!
Well, one good thing about this article being three years old now is that we've had three years for some things to have become much more clear since then. I could give you the details but I won't unless you ask because I don't want to waste your time or mine.
"despair in the experts and scientists themselves"? Yeah, it's called "believing your own press", and it's almost always a bad thing. Of course, usually said press is too much on the positive side instead of the negative side, so perhaps in this case the sentiment is better expressed as "believing your own garbage data and models built on that data".
“calling this stuff out" means calling a lot of this climate stuff out as being the doomsday-cult type thinking that it is. Said thinking clearly should be treated with disdain instead of being encouraged.
The barrier reef will generally be fine. It may change a bit ("adapt", as it's called), and its size and location may shift a bit, but it's been doing that kind of thing for eons now anyway.
Since supposedly the poorest and most populous among us will be hurt the most here anyway (that probably isn't really true, but whatever), then the "human consumption" problem will probably be self-correcting, just as long as we don't do anything to interfere with that process.
The last I read of it, the plummeting fish stock issue was being blamed on the fact that the Chinese were taking something like 7x the number of fish out of the oceans than they're supposed to. So maybe we should be doing everyone a favor here and shipping a lot of those invasive Asian carp back to them, huh?
If by 2008 you're referring to the economic collapse, quite a few of us did see that coming! In fact, the economic modelers at the big company where I worked at the time not only saw it coming, but they thought they'd positioned the company well enough to sail through it relatively unscathed. It turns out that they weren't quite right about that last part, though.
The environment is going to be fine. It's been through a lot worse than anything we could ever put it through. Our ancestors lived through it, too; remember that.
Frankly, at this point I'm not sure what I'm more puzzled by: that so many people seem to be falling for this stuff, or that more people aren't calling it out for what it is.
PS: Oops! Turns out that I already read this long ago (I thought it sounded kind of familiar), but I may read it again just for laughs. Even though the story has a "JUL 20, 2018" date on it, it's actually several years old now. Places like Esquire must be getting kind of desperate if they're recycling old stories like this one.
"This story was published in the August 2015 issue of Esquire."