Do you believe this?

[Ryuushin]

I'm apathetic as well but like a few here has said, it gives time to plan what to do.

Maybe rising sea levels will wipe out the people who don't contribute to society >.>

[Kuya]

Ya, especially those blacks and poor people.

[Cow_k]

The only thing that gets me is that if this was actually as urgent as this guy is trying to point out, why isn't there more people up in arms about this? I have a hard time believing there wouldn't be more scientists stepping forward unless there really is some plan to take all the best and brightest and seal them up into a spaceship to abandon all the rest of us suckers to die. Why work on shit like the LHC or anything else for that matter if we're all going to be wiped out in the next century? We've got one guy versus how many others here?

I'm not saying shit isn't happening, but the lack of urgency seems fishy to me.

[Solefald]

The only thing that gets me is that if this was actually as urgent as this guy is trying to point out, why isn't there more people up in arms about this? I have a hard time believing there wouldn't be more scientists stepping forward unless there really is some plan to take all the best and brightest and seal them up into a spaceship to abandon all the rest of us suckers to die. Why work on shit like the LHC or anything else for that matter if we're all going to be wiped out in the next century? We've got one guy versus how many others here?

I'm not saying shit isn't happening, but the lack of urgency seems fishy to me.

Global warming isn't the end of the world, it's just majorly disruptive to the ecological and world orders. And it's mostly not scientists' job to solve it, it's politicians' job. And when politicians are involved, there's always some kind of moneyed interest trying to persuade them not to solve the problem.

[Mayareira]

Again, this isn't the first time the earth is going through a climate change. It has happened before and did have negative and positive impacts.

In addition to that, there has always been a doomsday scenario. From ice ages to meteorites....always.

Will the world end in next 80-100 years? I don't think so..but taking some sensible precautions to increase the quality of life won't do any harm.

Like the above poster mentioned its mostly politicians job...and its a double edged sword. If you ask companies to go green, they'll reflect the cost to the consumers and people won't like that. Certainly, the most sensible way to do this is to spread it to a long term...this isn't a one day job.

[Tristam]

The only thing that gets me is that if this was actually as urgent as this guy is trying to point out, why isn't there more people up in arms about this? I have a hard time believing there wouldn't be more scientists stepping forward unless there really is some plan to take all the best and brightest and seal them up into a spaceship to abandon all the rest of us suckers to die. Why work on shit like the LHC or anything else for that matter if we're all going to be wiped out in the next century? We've got one guy versus how many others here?

I'm not saying shit isn't happening, but the lack of urgency seems fishy to me.

If you act like it's urgent, you get called a propagandist or fearmonger. People consider immediate threats, real or imagined, more urgent than threats drawn out over timescales longer than a human life, regardless of what the consequences might be over sufficiently long timescales. The truth is it's tough to predict how urgent something like climate change is when society is so complex that the more precise a prediction is the more likely it is to be "wrong" somehow. Then of course you have the people that will attempt to invalidate an entire field due to that wrong prediction in the face of the mountain of evidence. This is why I generally don't like things like An Inconvenient Truth and other such pieces, as they leave themselves open to nitpickers who don't actually understand the principles behind the science and wrap themselves up in the scenarios that seem to be "disproven" over short timescales. Basically, it's easy to make a misleading counterargument about a single complexity when the basics are much more simple. Forest from the trees.

This is like the huge misconception that the people looking at aerosol cooling in the 70s predicted a global ice age, when the reality of the situation was that you had two competing models for human-induced climate change, one in which human produced aerosols would increase the albedo of the atmosphere and reflect more sunlight (like the effect produced by volcano eruptions) vs. the AGW model which predicted the effects of the greenhouse gases would outweigh the particulate aerosol effect. The actual debate was which one would prove more influential, both of these effects are real but little work had been done in quantifying and studying the magnitudes of the influences. Obviously, AGW is the winner by a landslide given the past 40 or so years of work, the actual recorded changes in climate, and validated predictions of the AGW theory (stratosphere cooling and the like).

There is little debate that society as a whole is currently unprepared to deal with the economic and health costs associated with an increasingly volatile climate, but I don't think that it's an impossible thing to deal with as long as we make better use of technology and resources in the face of a problem that has so much inertia built up it's practically impossible to stop completely.

As far as working on things like LHC etc, I'm a big fan of doing science for science's sake. If for no other reason than most science is done by or in collaboration with people in training for things like advanced degrees, or doing postdoctoral work learning techniques/systems that will be applied to whatever independent projects they take up when they can secure funding. Science is increasingly interdisciplinary, and when you can apply lessons learned in one system to another field, you can sometimes improve the field by large amounts.

[Zilong]

This gives us plenty of time to build floating cities. Get to it engineers!

Or underwater cities.

Dibs on the Bouncer suits

[Blabj]

Or underwater cities.

Dibs on the Bouncer suits

This.

But... Would you kindly give me the bouncer suit?

[The Stig]

If we're to be flooded I demand the world to look as pretty as the "Big Blue" levels in F-Zero.