>The north american midwest is flat because it used to be an shallow sea.
Personally, I just take the IPCC reports as the best state of the current knowledge and proceed from there. They do not predict that the central US will be flooded anytime soon. They predict 2C warming over the next century which will produce changes that are annoying but survivable. In other words, nothing worth returning to the stone age for.
All the more shrill predictions and extreme policy measures don't seem to be backed up by evidence or any sensible cost-benefit analysis.
I accept the science, I just don't accept all the panic.
That's out of context. It was an example of the kind of change the earth has seen in epochs where polar ice melts completely, not a prediction for the immediate future. And the IPCC has 4C as its upper bound, not 2, and in any case they don't predict motion of antarctic ice sheets due to lack of models. Their predictions for sea level change are conservative, basically.
And as far as hyperbole goes:
> In other words, nothing worth returning to the stone age for.
Taking the bus and paying more for electricity is "returning to the stone age?" Now who's panicking?
Suppose there's a 10% chance that the Gulf Stream will turn off (an event which has previously occurred, and which was followed by extreme rapid cooling of northern Europe), given one set of policy choices, and a .1% percent chance, given another set. How much should we be willing to pay to implement the second set?
The thing that always gets me about this debate, and the energy debates in general, is that energy efficiency is still far and away the most productive energy investment around: what is needed is ways for individual consumers to make those investment easily.
That logic doesn't work. You might as well argue that traffic laws are inappropriate because you almost certainly won't get killed on the way home today.
This is called "risk assessment", and it's an important and crucial part of any policy discussion. You don't just pick the average and assume that will happen, you weigh costs vs. risks across the board, including the "best" and "worst" scenarios, and try to come up with a safe, conservative plan for avoiding the worst effects.
I think you're misunderstanding the use of the "worst case" in the IPCC report. Those aren't OMGWTFBBQ scenarios from someone's dreams, they are the scenarios from the actual science that lie within a reasonably tight bound. They are likely consequences for some value of "likely" (probably a 95% confidence, or the like).
Personally, I just take the IPCC reports as the best state of the current knowledge and proceed from there. They do not predict that the central US will be flooded anytime soon. They predict 2C warming over the next century which will produce changes that are annoying but survivable. In other words, nothing worth returning to the stone age for.
All the more shrill predictions and extreme policy measures don't seem to be backed up by evidence or any sensible cost-benefit analysis.
I accept the science, I just don't accept all the panic.