I don’t know much in climate, so if the climate scientists consensus is that climate change is real and of human origin, I’ll trust them… at least until another consensus emerges. For curiosity’s sake, I’ve read skeptics’ arguments and, to me, the only potentially convincing one was that climate fluctuates all the time, and we can’t tell if this current warming is a real trend and if it’s of human origins.

Again, I don’t know much about this, I’m not qualified to rebuke that… Although, if I had to try, I’d point to the PETM and how the increase in greenhouse gasses leads to a durable global warming, but that only works if you accept all the science that backs PETM anyway.

How the Arctic may have looked like back then.

So let’s forget about this because, beside the eternal pursuit of Truth, it’s all irrelevant. But why? Well, we have two extreme scenarios to evaluate:

1. Global warming isn’t real or isn’t caused by humans, yet we do everything to stop our carbon emissions.
2. Global warming is real and is caused by humans, yet we keep increasing our carbon emissions.

Of course all the in-between scenarios exist but let’s just focus on those two and evaluates the pros and cons:

Scenario 1:

It costs dearly to the fossil fuel industry and states/countries depending on it for their economy while we suffer from global warming damage. In exchange, renewable energy is widespread and most industries or transportation systems are electrified or use fuel alternatives.

If we set aside global warming and its consequences, if we compensate for the loss of fossil fuel industry by helping the transition to low-carbon ones, then the outcome isn’t so bad. We’d have less air and water pollution (hopefully), and that’s a good thing. No need for science here, just breathe a car’s exhaust and you know that stuff isn’t good for your health.

Quick aside on fossil fuel, similarly to nuclear energy, I feel they suffer from too much of a bad reputation. They’re super useful and convenient, that’s why we started using them in the first place. I don’t think we should stop using them entirely, although not as widely and as blindly as we are now. But we might not have better alternatives for some specific cases like aviation.

The risk with demonizing them as much is to lose the possibility of improving them furthermore or even worse, forgetting our know-how of using them at all, losing a precious technological tool which, like everything, comes with its own set of drawbacks.

Scenario 2:

We could have stopped it, we didn’t care. Sea levels ate at coastlines, engulfed islands. Warmer climate made drastic changes to agriculture, changed rain patterns, rendered human activities impossible without AC units in some regions. We can imagine it created lots of deaths (to famine or natural disasters) as well as high levels of migrations (both internal and external), probably causing some wars over food and water supplies. But hey, Russia has water access all year round now!

We probably won’t disappear, but it will be quite the havoc. Even if the place you live in isn’t directly harmed, you’ll probably have to deal with some consequences. Some countries will fail, some will adapt, millions might die and there might even be some “Nuremberg-like ecocide trial”. Overall, a pretty dire situation we could have avoided.

Wait, that's not how Scrabble works!

Note that this way of thinking can be generalized to all sorts of issues. It’s based on the core principle of FMECA, where you try to prevent/mitigate problems, by evaluating the probability of the event occurring and the damage it might cause.

A minor annoyance that happens all the time is worth preventing, as well as an unlikely but life-threatening event. So, imagine if we had a very likely and very life-threatening event to deal with…

There you have it, taking action, even if ultimately meaningless, isn’t so bad, especially when you compare it to the other possibility. So we should act regardless of the origin or reality of global warming, hence why I think it’s irrelevant. Now, what level of action to take in order to minimize risks is the real debate we should have.

In the end, the path we’ll take is one between those two extremes. I’ll just hope it’s one where we don’t regret too much the choices made for us here and now…