The cynic in me imagines that the media purposely promoted the longer timelines to lull people into thinking we had more time, and so there was no rush.
I think it’s more about scientists being extremely conservative with their estimates, because they know they’ll get impaled over being ‘alarmist.’
And then (effectively) fired from their job.
Also, you should check out conservative coverage. There is no timeline compression, its strait up cynicism, hostile denial.
EDIT: I forgot hand wringing. A perfect example: fairly scientific family showed me a WSJ article about how future geoengineering is going to make climate change a non-issue.
“Offended” did not begin to describe my reaction.
I’ve been reading geoengineering research papers for years, and they amount to things like:
Well, if we redirected a significant portion of the global economy to custom airplane and chemical production, we could rain sulfuric acid over the poles and wipe out all life beyond a certain latitude, and maybe counter the warming some if we keep it up… ecological implications aside, its still rather impractical, but an order of magnitude cheaper than previous proposals. Shows table.
The cynic in me imagines that the media purposely promoted the longer timelines to lull people into thinking we had more time, and so there was no rush.
I think it’s more about scientists being extremely conservative with their estimates, because they know they’ll get impaled over being ‘alarmist.’
And then (effectively) fired from their job.
Also, you should check out conservative coverage. There is no timeline compression, its strait up cynicism, hostile denial.
EDIT: I forgot hand wringing. A perfect example: fairly scientific family showed me a WSJ article about how future geoengineering is going to make climate change a non-issue.
“Offended” did not begin to describe my reaction.
I’ve been reading geoengineering research papers for years, and they amount to things like: