You think exaggerating is “better”?
Well, you have to face the fact that that “Billions” was not ever said here in this thread, so, we are not defending that, so you are ***exaggerating ***by trying to claim that we support that statement. IOW, you are right that exaggeration is not helpful. 
It has to be noticed that you are not acknowledging that you, and most of the right, was wrong by trusting Lomborg on the way he misuses reports, that while accurate on an specific issue, it grossly misleads regarding the big picture.
I said it, in post #214 in this thread, while acknowledging that the original source was “another thread”. In trying to craft a defense of that statement, Kimstu wrote this:
You may not consider her post “defending that” or “support[ing] that statement”, but I suspect most reasonable readers will not see it that way.
Finally! The admission you’ve been so loathe to make! Thank you! As for the rest of the snipped paragraph, I think it would be worthwhile to repeat something I said earlier:
As you can hopefully see from the quote above, I’m certainly open to hearing arguments along the lines of ‘he’s misleading on the big picture’, but that’s not the approach you decided to take. You just said “Lomborg is always wrong”. That’s not convincing and makes you look worse when you have to backtrack.
What’s the “scientific consensus” on how many people are likely to die from climate change, let’s say between now and 2100?
Like you will then when acknowledging that Lomborg pulled a fast one with those seemingly accurate statements? Again, his intention was to mislead and that is what me and others showed already.
Because it is clear that you are not reading, I still stand on my statement that Lomborg is always wrong, because he has mercenary reasons to be that way and it was demonstrated that he does what gish gallopers do, buried in their statements we will find a few accurate statements, but they are geared in support of gross lies and inaccuracies.
Dodging the question. Retry, Abort, Fail ?
Again, you need to pay more attention to what people are actually saying rather than what you wish they’d said. What I said about that statement was just that it might not be as far off as you complacently imagine, and that we might lose a billion or more humans to the overall impacts of climate change.
That’s not “defending” it in the sense of asserting it’s true; that’s just challenging your unthinking dismissal of it as ridiculously exaggerated “alarmist” “hyperbole”.
You appear to be contradicting yourself in the same sentence. Or perhaps you’re using “stand by” or “always” in some non-standard way?
I’m paying attention to what YOU are saying. You wrote:
You’ve made a fairly specific claim here, about the potential deaths of 900 million people, and I’d like to know the source of it. Do you have a cite?
That should have been “stand on”, not “by”.
You seem to not be aware of what a Gish Gallop is, Lomborg is an expert on that. In that fallacy some accurate items are used with the intention to mislead others on the big picture.
Again, as you told us, you will look at the evidence after it was clear that I can report that there are 2 items were he is correct, the point stands that he uses those correct bits of information and sets them up to deceive many. So, it is your turn now.
It is no different from Astrologers that tell you that there is a Sun, a Mars, a Venus, etc. and you think that Lomborg is a good accurate fellow by pointing that. While ignoring the tons of bullshit that Astrologers then try to pull in their horoscopes.
The rest of that article describes a variety of unfortunately plausible scenarios in which warming would significantly exceed 1.5 degrees, worsening the catastrophic nature of the results.
Honestly, HD, I’m baffled as to why you’re trying to insist that mortality on this order of magnitude must somehow be a “hyperbolically” unrealistic prospect. Hundreds of millions of deaths due to climate change is not at all unrealistic, based on the fairly conservative and scientifically conscientious estimates of the IPCC. And a billion or more deaths is merely the high end of the fairly short linear scale of “hundreds of millions”.
Sure, you personally are probably not going to live in a world where climate-change impacts will be felt at such magnitudes. But your grandchildren probably will. If you just can’t wrap your head around the notion that “hundreds of millions” or even “billions” is a more reasonable estimate for total mortality from climate change than, say, “hundreds of thousands” (hell, we’re already on track to get into the “millions” well before 2030), then consciously or not, you’re engaging in some kind of irrational denial.
We have a problem. According the bestest, most intelligentest and knowledgeablest president Trump, America is full. He can’t be wrong, so how are we going to fit all these new babies?
What is the solution? Killing the old people? Better yet, we should kill all of the brown people, they aren’t real Americans anyway.
Would you agree that “the Intellectualist” (an online publisher and aggregator that covers politics, science, feminism, and secularism) is not among “serious sources of climate science reporting”? The author, Jake Thomas, describes himself like this:
It doesn’t sound like he’s a climatologist (although I’m certainly open to correction on this point). His “article” appears to be a glorified re-telling of this article (“UN Says Climate Genocide Is Coming. It’s Actually Worse Than That.”) in the New York Magazine. So what about New York Magazine? Are they intellectual heavy-weights? A source we could rightly label one of the “serious sources of climate science reporting”? I’ll let them answer for themselves (if the headline of their article wasn’t enough of a clue):
So what about the author: David Wallace-Wells? His Twitter account says he’s the “Deputy editor and climate columnist for New York magazine” and has apparently authored a book titled “The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming”. On Twitter, his publisher is touting his book as:
It gets better still though. The book is apparently based on an article he wrote in 2017 by the same title. Here is how Wikipedia describes the response to the article:
It seems that our friend David has made a career for himself out of hyping the consequences of global warming. Good for him, but I don’t think you should be turning to him as a source when the complaint is that there’s too much hyperbole in the global warming discussion and you’re arguing the point that it’s not really hyperbole.
So let’s set aside the fear-mongering and turn to what real scientists say. After all, there was an actual IPCC report that was referenced (indirectly, without a link) in your cite:
AFAICT, this is the actual IPCC report that your cite is referring to. Now, I haven’t read the whole thing yet, I just perused the “Summary for Policymakers”. I didn’t see anything in there about a billion dead (or “hundreds of millions”). Perhaps they buried it in the main report (which would be fucking BIZARRE because “hundreds of millions will die” seems like exactly the sort of thing one should include in their “Summary for Policymakers”). Either way, I’m back to asking you for a cite again, preferably one from among the “serious sources of climate science reporting”, and not more of this hyperbolic bullshit.
:rolleyes: Well, if you bothered to read some of the report’s details instead of just fuming about the website that summarized them, you’d see that those estimates are, again, not at all unrealistic. Chapter 3 is the part that talks about impacts on natural and human systems of 1.5 degrees C of warming (which is probably significantly lowballing the amount of warming we’ll actually get):
Here are some examples from the same chapter of realistic possible outcomes of mid-case and worst-case scenarios (and remember that the IPCC’s scenarios have usually been relatively optimistic compared to how things turned out):
Again, think about what these massively increased risks mean quantitatively. Natural disasters already kill about 50K people per year, malaria kills one million annually, and other tropical diseases maybe half a million. Famines even during the comparatively food-rich 20th century killed about 70 million people. It is really not difficult, looking at the increased risk exposure in huge amounts of the global population even at optimistically restricted levels of warming which we’re almost certain to exceed, to plausibly estimate hundreds of millions of additional deaths as part of the total impact of climate change.
If the consensus about ocean level rise is accurate, it seems obvious that at the very least hundreds of millions, if not billions, will be displaced in the coming century or so, and such mass displacements always have a lot of death along with them. Just from looking at population maps. Billions of people live near low lying coasts.
You’ve been steadily moving the goalposts during our conversation. It started out with a quote (by another poster) that “billions will likely die”. You moved that back to one billion, and from there we’ve come down to hundreds of millions. And it’s no longer “likely”, but now to “It is really not difficult… to plausibly estimate hundreds of millions of additional deaths”. I suppose you’re right that it’s really not that difficult. Apparently anyone can do it: journalists touting their latest book, aspiring PoliSci PhD students, and random Dopers all seem to be able to estimate wildly-inflated figures.
You wrote earlier “I don’t think it’s at all unreasonable to suggest that we might lose a billion or more humans to the combined effects of climate change before we manage to regain a more stable climate system. (If we ever do.)”. I certainly believe that you “don’t think it’s at all unreasonable”, but I want to know WHY you think that. Is it because you’ve been reading articles by the likes of Jake Thomas and David Wallace-Wells? The IPCC reports don’t seem to back up your belief. They talk about people “exposed to water scarcity” and “exposed to extreme drought” or “exposed to flooding”, but we all know that people “exposed to water scarcity” don’t all die from dehydration and people “exposed to flooding” don’t all drown. The IPCC report did say this:
They don’t appear to quantify it there. You did though. You made a specific claim that you “don’t think it’s at all unreasonable to suggest that we might lose a billion or more humans to the combined effects of climate change”. Where did you get this figure from? Did you read it in an IPCC report? An Intellectualist “article”? Did you concoct it on your own with some personal napkin-figuring based off historical malaria and famine numbers? I’m not trying to pick on you, but you’re the poster that earlier advised me “If you (generic you) want to avoid implausible hyperbole and alarmism, it’s easy to do by sticking to serious sources of climate science reporting.” Should I be regarding your posts here as “implausible hyperbole and alarmism” or do they have an actual basis in “serious sources of climate science reporting”?
I’m going to ask you for cites too. What’s the “consensus about ocean level rise”? Are we talking about 1 meter? 3 meters? 30 meters? And which population map(s) would you suggest I look at?
People, people, please. Unless you can provide a specific number of deaths, and prove it’s correct in a way that is both absolutely certain and yet doesn’t rely on any (so-called-)scientific publications, any claims that you make that anything bad will happen are nothing but hyperbole.
Yes, I for one certainly do.