Who is it that is warning about Climate Change?
Scientists, right?
Are scientists warning us about climate change, or are they telling us about climate change? There is an important distinction and it comes down to risk.
Consider a burning building.
A fireman: “Get the hell out of there, or you’ll be killed!”
A scientist: “If you stay in the burning building for a further 3 mins and 24 secs, you’re chances of survival are 50%. Caveat, I am a heat exposure specialist, so I have not considered death due to smoke inhalation, that’s not my field.”
The scientist is telling us about the risk, the fireman is communicating based on minimising the risk. These two approaches are very different.
In my line of work I am involved in designing mechanical systems. We use fault tree analysis and the target acceptable risk is often of the order of 1 failure per 10^6 operations. One in a million. That is an acceptable risk of failure in system design.
So I find it incredible that emission reduction pathways are aligned to provide a 50/50 probabilty of keeping the planet to <2C of warming. This is apparently what we consider to be an acceptable level of risk for society design.
Studies show that “even the earliest potential peaking date now offers only a 50/50 chance of staying below the 2C threshold” with 1.5C “virtually impossbile”.
How can we be tossing a coin for the survival of our civilisations?
This also ignores the parts of the world that will become uninhabitable at temp rises of <2C and also implies that scientific knowledge is complete.