SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
A story notes that
[...] according to a new U.S. Army report, Americans could face a horrifically grim future from climate change involving blackouts, disease, thirst, starvation and war. The study found that the US military itself might also collapse. This could all happen over the next two decades, the report notes.
[...] The report paints a frightening portrait of a country falling apart over the next 20 years due to the impacts of climate change on "natural systems such as oceans, lakes, rivers, ground water, reefs, and forests.
Current infrastructure in the US, the report says, is woefully underprepared: "Most of the critical infrastructures identified by the Department of Homeland Security are not built to withstand these altered conditions."
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 28 2019, @06:42AM
You must mean listening only to the experts you approve of?
Can I listen to an MIT atmospheric physicist specializing in the dynamics of atmospheric systems? He's published hundreds of papers, worked on the IPCC's first two reports and was a leader author on the IPCC's 3rd annual report (climate processes and feedbacks section), a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and much much more? Guess not because he's [cato.org] suggested that our climate alarmism is completely unjustified. In particular our current climate models fail even on their own training data. He feels that the reason is a fundamental error on how CO2 effects the climate. He believes temperature responds non-linearly at scale to CO2, as opposed to the "consensus" view of a linear reaction. The net effect is that even unrestrained emissions will likely have an impact, but mostly a negligible one, on Earth.
He has compared the current consensus on climate change to the consensus, not long ago, on the merit of eugenics. The point there is intentionally nontechnical. Any person could see that mandatory eugenics is an awful and extremely dangerous system. How then did it become the ubiquitous view in policy, science, education, and society in general? Because of social pressure. When people feel that they "should" think something, they are too quick to dismiss their own personal reservations for fear of being seen as a pariah, even when they know, deep down, that what the position they've chosen to adopt is wrong. Similarly too in climate today. What is your impression of somebody who might suggest that climate alarmism is unjustified? Probably not good, but that is not an organic reaction. What do you think of somebody who might suggest that there's good reason to suggest that spacetime is not asymptotically flat? You probably have no opinion and are likely equally uninformed on both topics. Yet you form a strong opinion on one because of social pressures.
And your bias there is widely shared. That leads to unquestioning support of a hypothesis that deserves much more questioning. We'd like to imagine that science is driven entirely by objective merit, but one needs only the vaguest familiarity with history to realize how unjustified that ideal is. It was no less than Max Planck who witted, "Science advances one funeral at a time." And that was at a time before science became so radically politicized as it has in modern times.