Some people also gain a lot from plague and war, but we still fight them. Climate change also doesn't just mean average temperatures are higher; when you put more energy into a system, it becomes more volatile. Climate change makes atypical seasons and extreme weather much more likely.
> Some people also gain a lot from plague and war, but we still fight them.
It's a good analogy. Though it goes both ways: some people make money (or preserve more of it) by preventing plague and war.
> Climate change makes atypical seasons and extreme weather much more likely.
Are people betting real money on this? I haven't seen any specific predictions predicting how many hurricanes there will be in 5, 10 years, etc. People are quick to blame every cat 5 hurricane on climate change, but if it were truly science than they would be predicting, not blaming.
My general point is our "scientific" tools are laughably bad for big complex systems. I work in medical research. It's a bad joke, and I'm dead serious. I don't think people understand how primitive our tools are (as far as they've come, still primitive compared to the challenges). So the OP might want to look at companies tackling that problem, the Observables or Wikipedias or Palantirs or NYTimes data team, etc.
Then there is a good analogy: tobacco. You believe smoking drastically increases the risk of cancer, right? Yet for years, tobacco companies argued that the evidence was inconclusive. After all, if a doctor can't predict which of their patients will respond well to a certain medication, how can they say that exposure to this or that substance was responsible for the cancer?
Tobacco is a great analogy. Yes, I believe smoking drastically increases the risk of cancer (1). I'm not arguing the evidence of climate change or co2 is inconclusive. I think it's very conclusive: global warming is happening and it's man made.
What I am arguing is that climate change is not good or bad. It just is.
I think we need better tools to understand climate change, and hopefully control it. However, I think "fighting climate change" is a partisan approach, and not scientific at all. For example, assume we are able to figure out how to reverse global warming, and in effect cool the planet. How cool should we go? By your statement "when you put more energy into a system, it becomes more volatile", we should keep going lower, and perhaps make it cooler than it was 100 years ago, which might be deadly for people living in colder northern climates or mountain towns. So any action on climate will have winners and losers. And "fighting climate change" means fighting the people who just happen to live in a different geographic region.
What I'm saying is the issue is complex, the numbers are massively bigger than even the type of data Google handles, and we need much better tools to tackle this set of very complicated problems.
(1) I also believe in the future we may learn that smoking is very healthy for a small fraction of people.
Standard procedure for handling a complex system is "First, do no harm," not "Futz around and hope we come out on top." We know that climate change is disrupting biomes everywhere. Life will eventually adapt, but not before a significant loss of biodiversity.
