I wish there were a way to bet against climate change disaster. So many pundits seem certain that climate change will doom humanity or destroy the global economy. People have a tendency or bias to overestimate the likelihood of bad news, just as the overwhelming majority of pundits wrongly predicted in 2016-2017 that the U.S. economy would enter recession due to Trump. So many people are predicting doom and gloom, but I don’t think much will happen even if temperatures rise a bit. Most of this seems like unfounded hysteria , like the Y2K crisis, which turned out to be nothing. The ecosystem is much more resilient than people think, and people underestimate human ingenuity to find solutions to problems.
One may notice a contradiction. In retrospect, the y2k crisis was nothing, but that is because engineers fixed the problem beforehand, limiting the potential damage. Likewise, so rather than there not being climate change, it won’t lead to economic and environmental crisis, because a solution will be found. I am not necessarily denying climate change, but I am optimistic about human ingenuity to either devise technology stop climate change or to lessen its consequences.
Consider the following trichotomy:
1. There will significant climate change
2. this will cause economic crisis due to environmental devastation and worsening weather
3. humans will be powerless to stave off #1 & 2 unless there is de-industrialization, and even that may fail
The forth possibility is 1 does not happen, or if 1 happens, there will be technology to prevent crisis without having to resort to de-industrialization, which would probably be as bad as an economic crisis anyway.
For the worst case scenario to happen, 1,2 and 3 must all happen. Even if 1 happens, which some argue is already happening, this may not imply disaster. So this means for me to lose my bet, multiple hurdles must be cleared by the opposing side. Because the probabilities are multiplied.
However, many on the ‘left’ don’t have such an optimistic assessment. Their argument is that climate change is going to get worse, that it will lead to economic and environmental crisis, and, most importantly, human ingenuity is powerless to stop it. There are only two choices: de-industrialization (which would lead to economic crisis, and thus not a good solution), or do nothing and society collapses.