You are not wrong. It has been my position from the start that we should advocate for minimizing human impact on the climate and invest in surviving the change that those who will not heed that advice will create. I can recommend the book "Apocalypse Never" by Michael Shellenberger. While I don't agree with all of his points he does call out some of the factors that drive unnecessary hype. Perhaps one of the biggest takeaways is that there are monied interests who are just as invested in scare mongering to damage their opponent interests as there are environmental groups.
That aside, some of the early research in climate change actually pointed out that the result of this climate instability may in fact be another glacial period rather than a period of extremely high temperatures. Just as damaging to people and ecosystems but not what a lot of people think about when they think "climate change."
And finally, there are a models and there are a bunch of unknowns. As the unknowns reveal themselves the models get better, but some things like the "great oxygenation events" that are documented in the fossil record are really really unknown.
The current wildfires are a good example of an unknown. The drought combined with lightning is burning millions of acres of forest. It can do that year after year for perhaps a decade, maybe two, and then the properties that make the forest subject to massive fires are mooted. So what then? Does the American northwest turn into a giant savannah with sparse trees and lots of grassland? When the ice has melted and the moisture carrying capacity of the air has quintupled, The annual rainstorms/hurricanes/monsoons will be biblically huge every year. How will people respond, how will we change the way we build, the way we live, the way we survive? It involves change but the challenges of living on the earth in those conditions is a couple of orders of magnitude less than the challenge of living on a planet that has never supported life in the first place.
Every generation is dumb in their own way, and we may get knocked back into a feudal existence, but what we can do as individuals remains the same, set good examples, practice less impactful living, and try to leave our patch of world better than it would have been had we not been there.
> That aside, some of the early research in climate change actually pointed out that the result of this climate instability may in fact be another glacial period rather than a period of extremely high temperatures. Just as damaging to people and ecosystems but not what a lot of people think about when they think "climate change."
I'm afraid you are the victim of another popular climate denial myth that continues to spread like a virus.
I appreciate where you are coming from, but in my case I believe you to be mistaken. The observation made by the IPCC and the general consensus of climate scientists is that the mechanism of climate change is a change in the balance of energy based on Earth's ability to radiate heat vs it's heat gain from internal and external sources. Nominally heat that would be radiated into space is 'trapped' because it is reflected back to the planet by greenhouse gases. The shift in greenhouse gases means that less heat is radiated so the average heat component rises.
But the key here is that in this discussion 'heat' here is a measure of energy not specifically temperature.
Climate change is the response of the current system when it has more latent energy versus without that latent energy. Those changes are varied, from changing thermoclines in the ocean to the changing ice levels at the poles.
A graduate student at Berkeley observed that the reason we talk about "glacial" cycles is because they leave durable marks in the landscape. But what sort of markers would a "hot cycle" leave? That was the fundamental question he was trying to answer. I believe his advisor had done his PhD on glacial cycles and there was a question of why weren't we in one given the periodicity of the geologic record.
So he was exploring the question of whether or not a "hot cycle" would somehow lead to a "cold cycle". The working hypothesis was was investigating cloud formation. I'm presuming that you've read the IPCC report and a number of papers on the models that are used so that you are familiar with the way in which they handle clouds. There are two kinds, clouds in the ionosphere and clouds in the troposphere. Their effect on surface temperature are exactly opposite.
From Chen Zhou in correspondence about his model work on climate, "It is worth noting that different cloud types have different climate radiative effects to the earth: high thin cirrus clouds warm the earth, while the marine boundary low clouds cool the earth significantly. To set a 90% cloud cover, you have to determine whether cirrus clouds or low clouds should be added: if you add cirrus clouds, the earth will warm significantly; if you add low clouds, the earth will cool."
And of course there were a number of papers that discussed "nuclear winter" which was a disruption of weather patterns by the particulates in the air from a general nuclear exchange. And papers that studied the weather effects of volcanic eruptions like Pinatubo in 1991.
So what this grad student was looking at was this; When you increase the mean temperature of the atmosphere, the ability for the air to hold moisture increases. When you increase the mean temperature of the oceans, evaporation rates increase. So more energy in the air means more moisture. There was another paper that discussed 'wet bulb' temperatures and how those would become more common as more moisture was being held in the air as well.
So what does that moisture do? Well it eventually condenses out of the air, first into clouds and then into precipitation. Because the difference in temperature between the surface and the ionosphere is greater, when rapid temperature changes occur (as they do when water condenses out of the air) you get huge upwellings. Basically much stronger storms, stronger tornadoes, and stronger hurricanes Etc. So what if there is enough heat in the air so that it keeps the moisture from condensing into drops and stays as clouds? Well if they appear at low altitude the surface gets really cold, if they appear at high altitude the surface gets hotter. Which we get isn't in the models because nobody knows yet how that will play out.
What that meant is that it is worth considering the effect of tropospheric clouds. If things got really cold, it could blanket the northern latitudes with 100% of snow cover that did not melt all year round. The 'year without a summer' which occurred when Krakatoa erupted is believed (but not proven) to have been this sort of effect. Snow cover increases the planets albedo and that increases the radiation of heat into space. If the northern lattitudes were covered in cloud and snow 365 days of the year you create a new model where water is evaporating in an over heated equatorial region flowing north and south and then contributing to the continuing cloud cover and precipitation. And THAT could lead to glaciation.
Is that going to happen? I don't think anyone knows. Can you tweak the current climate models and make it happen? Sure, just add a lot of low continuous cloud cover being resupplied with moisture from the equator.
But it is equally important to understand that this is climate change which is just as much human induced as baking in a dry desert. It isn't denying the science, it is looking at the science and the models and asking "Okay, given what we know what changes in the model cause what changes in the habitability of the planet?" And perhaps more importantly, how can we identify, as early as possible, how the model needs to incorporate what we're seeing in order to continue to help us understand what the future may hold.
That aside, some of the early research in climate change actually pointed out that the result of this climate instability may in fact be another glacial period rather than a period of extremely high temperatures. Just as damaging to people and ecosystems but not what a lot of people think about when they think "climate change."
And finally, there are a models and there are a bunch of unknowns. As the unknowns reveal themselves the models get better, but some things like the "great oxygenation events" that are documented in the fossil record are really really unknown.
The current wildfires are a good example of an unknown. The drought combined with lightning is burning millions of acres of forest. It can do that year after year for perhaps a decade, maybe two, and then the properties that make the forest subject to massive fires are mooted. So what then? Does the American northwest turn into a giant savannah with sparse trees and lots of grassland? When the ice has melted and the moisture carrying capacity of the air has quintupled, The annual rainstorms/hurricanes/monsoons will be biblically huge every year. How will people respond, how will we change the way we build, the way we live, the way we survive? It involves change but the challenges of living on the earth in those conditions is a couple of orders of magnitude less than the challenge of living on a planet that has never supported life in the first place.
Every generation is dumb in their own way, and we may get knocked back into a feudal existence, but what we can do as individuals remains the same, set good examples, practice less impactful living, and try to leave our patch of world better than it would have been had we not been there.