But climate change can be good, too, so let’s not be a Debbie Downer. 
Here’s the excluded middle again. According to asahi one must believe that either we’re on the verge of societal collapse or we’re ignoring the problem. I choose neither.
So if we have an all-out nuclear exchange between Russia and the US, is there an excluded middle?
Then why are you blithely saying that increased rainfall is an advantage, not a problem, for the Northeast?
And why did you say, in response to my pointing out multiple ways in which excessive rainfall is indeed bad,
I’m not sure why you’re going down a political path. I’m a full supporter of the basic science behind HIGW. I’m an ardent supporter of nuclear power because I believe it is the best (the only, imo) solution to combating CC. If it was left up to me I’d jack up the tax on fossil fuels to reduce usage. I’ve said nothing about both sides in this thread.
All I’m saying is that while CC is (and will be) a problem the OP is hyperbolic fear mongering. I believe it creates anxiety and is counterproductive. In this thread people seem to think that downplaying the fear mongering is the same as downplaying everything.
I am not the cleanest writer so perhaps this is my fault but what I said was that additional rainfall is not necessarily bad. It might be bad; it might be good in some ways. Not all change is automatically bad.
At the risk of repeating myself: When someone intuitively sees overall planetary warming as something that can have both beneficial as well as negative effects, and someone else points out that almost all of the effects are overwhelmingly negative, it’s all too easy to accuse the latter of doomsday-style fearmongering. But the appropriate approach to factual accuracy is not to rely on intuition or old sayings, but to fully inform oneself by reading authoritative assessments like the IPCC Working Group 2 assessment on the impacts of climate change, and the many other available publications for the layman like the IPCC SREX report on extreme weather events. These are the authoritative distillation of thousands of the most cited peer-reviewed papers.
In other words–
Previous predictions of doom failed simply because the previous prophets had the bad luck to be short-sighted. But if we keep predicting doom, sooner or later one of us is bound to be right!
No, that is not what I said, and please refrain from putting words in my mouth.
Stranger
This is asahi’s bag - “I and I alone was right and you were all wrong, we’re all doomed and there’s nothing anyone can do about it”.
He did it when Loser Donald got elected and he’s doing it now.
I’ve read every one of @asahi’s posts, Mr. Obvious, so you don’t need to point that out to me 
and I do not see this as gloating. I call this lamenting. As in, “I’m right and I wish very badly that I was not.”
It’s definitely NOT gloating:
gloating
/ˈɡlōdiNG/
adjective
adjective: gloating
- dwelling on one’s own success or another’s misfortune with smugness or malignant pleasure.
“gloating accounts of his triumphs”
I don’t think @asahi takes any pleasure, malignant or otherwise, in being right.
I’d say, and not to put words in @Stranger_On_A_Train’s mouth, but previous predictions of doom did not come to pass because the warnings were heeded, and we actually did something to prevent them.
We stopped pumping CFC’s into the atmosphere, so the most dire warnings about the destruction of the ozone layer did not come to pass (though it is still quite damaged). We learned more productive ways of growing crops to feed our growing population, without which, the predictions of starvation would have come to pass(though we may soon run into issues with our agricultural practices). We stopped using DDT in massive quantities, or else the warnings of the overuse of DDT could have come to pass.
We are not addressing anthropogenic climate change, and so there is no reason to believe that the dire warnings from that will not come to pass.
I’ve often said that the most woeful words that ever come out of my mouth are, “I was right, and you were wrong.” because knowing that I was right is a small comfort for the unfortunate situation we find ourselves in because others did not heed my warnings.
Absolutely true! I can look back on many situations (often related to loved ones’ health) where I was right and wished mightily that I had been wrong. “Being right” in and of itself is frequently nothing to be celebrated.
I was “right” about trumpy while others on the board were clobbering me and telling me to “give him a chance.” BFD. I would gladly have turned out to be wrong.
Are you referring to the town that two weeks ago burned to the ground (well, 90% of it did)?
Ehh, I’ve seen posts elsewhere on the internet from (someone purporting to be) him that sound a LOT like gloating, right down to directly insulting people who disagree with him and declaiming superior personal insight and intellect.
But I acknowledge this is off topic. Back to whether planning for the future is a waste of time.
Why wouldn’t it be? It was lack of planning for the future that got us into the mess.
The fact that things are getting bad, and are going to get worse, doesn’t get us off the hook of doing what we can to prevent them from being even worse than that.
The fact that we seem to have a bleak future, that there will be large swaths of the world that may be rendered uninhabitable, does not mean that we should not plan for that, try to do our best to work with it.
It is too late to prevent things from being bad. It’s probably not too late to prevent them from being even worse.
Because it’s too late? The damage is done, unrepairable, and too serious to survive? I think this thread was started with that belief in mind, as were many replies, thus some of the debate that’s already happened.
That’s the excuse that many climate denialists have moved to. Directly from, “It’s not happening”, to “It’s too late to do anything.”
The OP didn’t say it was too late, the OP said that the future was bleak. That there would be large swaths of the SouthWest that were no longer habitable.
As I already said in the post that you responded to, but for some reason ignored:
I do not believe that you have very well understood what has been said if you came away with that impression.
It isn’t that just that “there is no reason to believe that the dire warnings from that will not come to pass,”; we are actually seeing the specific predictions made by climatologists occurring now in real time. There is no longer any reasonable doubt that anthropogenic climate change is occurring, nor that the consequences are hewing toward the more catastrophic end of the spectrum of predictions. And this isn’t just based upon drought conditions in the US Southwest (which is known to have such swings in the geological record); those impacts are being seen around the world, from reduction in Arctic Ice, to historic megafires in Australia and Siberia, to increase in ocean temperature and acidity, to extreme tropical storm activity across multiple seasons that by dint of total energy can only be due to an increase in thermal energy retention due to the greenhouse effect. We’re beyond just projections of what may happen in a hypothetical future; we’re now in the state where mitigations need to be applied in the present.
There was a time to have a cost vs. benefits analysis, but that was back in circa 1990 after the end of the Cold War when we could have discussed using resources freed up from the ideological context to progressively move the global economy away from oil and coal by investing and developing alternative technologies. Instead, the US and its allies immediately got engaged in the Middle East to make sure that oil remained cheap and freely available regardless of the eventual cost, rendering any discussion of alternatives moot. The notion that there might be some benefit to the rapid and unprecedented increase in global temperature is like saying that there is a benefit in being stabbed in that it might happen to take out your appendix in the process; in theory, that might be of some theoretical benefit but while you are on the ground bleeding to death the hypothetical of appendicitis doesn’t really have much practical merit.
Without annual snowpack and water from the Colorado River, California becomes an arid desert, unsuited for agriculture and able to sustain only a small fraction of the current population. Without forests, the ecosystem of the Pacific Northwest Coast Ranges collapses, becoming dry slopes and desiccated wetlands prone to seasonal wildfires. Without the already sparse rain that sweeps east off of those ranges, the inner and upper West United States becomes dry grasslands. There is no upside to this, and the idea that there is some benefit to tradeoff here is a fallacy.
Actually, it means we need to making and implementing actual plans now, instead of framing out some possible action in the future. The US Department of Defense–you know, those tree-hugging liberals with their pie-in-the-sky ambitions–regards the impact of global climate change as the major security issue of the 21st century; greater than China or Russia or any other individual nation-state with superpower ambitions. If the warfighters are making plans to address climate change as a national security threat, maybe it is time that the rest of us do as well.
Stranger