Climate Hysteria: Vote For Biden! Edition

Funny how all the "science" always points to whatever the progressives/Dems want.

It's hard to know what to think about climate change / AGW. As far as I can tell, there's modest warming, and we ought to take it into account. It has beneficial (e.g.: greening) as well as harmful (e.g. flooding) effects. Our only real hope is nuclear, but that's going to take awhile. Fracking is a good way to bridge the gap. Renewables might be valuable here and there, but they're not a serious alternative for mass energy production. There is no known tipping point coming up in a decade--and no sign that the blue team actually believes there is one. Climate change is not an "existential crisis," and not even the IPCC thinks it is. The Copenhagen consensus puts it down around 15th+ on the list of major problems we face.

    The thing to remember about the left is that they want massive, spastic change all the time, and one of their most common tactics for getting it is manufacturing crises. They've manufactured a racism crisis--and, specifically, a police-racism crisis. It's based on a few distorted anecdotes and an elementary statistical error. One the basis of those, we're already sliding toward radical leftist social change--and change mainly for the very much worse. 

   The left has a history of panicking--or pretending to panic--about a rolling series of imaginary climate crises--global cooling, global warming, acid rain, overpopulation, famine... It's not clear what all the explanations/causes are. But one of them is: it's a tactic for scaring people into backing leftist policies. The Green New Deal, for example, isn't primarily a climate plan, it's primarily an economic plan. It's main purpose is to move the U.S. toward socialism. Climate change is a stalking-horse. No sane person would write the Green New Deal if they genuinely believed that we faced an "existential" climate tipping-point in a decade. 

   Finally: it's not "settled science." Declaring something "science" is just one of the left's tactics for shutting down discussion / debate. And shutting down discussion is one of the Orwellian left's main (non-)debating tactics. They have various different crackpot versions of the strategy, from Your politically incorrect disagreement constitutes violence to The science is settled to the closely-related No time for debate! We're all going to die! Notice also that both left and right have a tendency to invoke an extreme fallibilism when it benefits them. On the left this manifests itself as a tendency to flip back and forth between The science is settled! and Science is never settled!, depending on what benefits them at the time.

   That doesn't mean there's no warming, nor that we shouldn't study it.  It means that, as a layperson, it's hard to know what's really happening. In fact, it's pretty clear that it's hard to tell even for the experts. But here's my current conclusion: as usual, the left's freakout about climate change is driven mainly by (a) their general tendency toward hysteria and catastrophism and (b) a dishonest, deceptive, political ploy to frighten the public into doing what they want. Which is not to say that that's what's producing belief in the average Democrat / left-leaning centrist. Most  of them genuinely believe it. And they believe it because they listen to people like AOC and her handlers. Only at a fairly high level in the hierarchy do people become savvy enough to realize it's a scam. Though also: the left is adept at doublethink...and that's where genuine belief and political calculation merge.

   Of course it's not like the right is immune to this sort of thing...but the right is a somewhat different story, IMO. And it's not much of a threat right now. Though that may change if this election goes as bad as it looks like it will...