Well, one of the issues is magnitude: do we get, naturally or unnaturally, temperatures back to the level of the Medieval Warm Period or do we get a "cataclysm" (or do we get the next Ice Age, we are overdue one, and the same general group of people and some of the same people were warning of that before the '80s).
"Worth doing something" is nice and fine, but that "something" really needs to be connected to the probability of the risk. The extreme warmists want us to essentially spend all the world's disposable wealth on something that has at best a very shaky scientific foundation (cataclysm). It would be a real pity if we did that and it turned out we were entering the next Ice Age instead, or needed the money for some other greater threat instead (e.g. one of the ones mentioned in this discussion, like a megacaldera cutting lose). A maxim of warfare is that the side that tends to win in a battle is the one that is the last to commit its reserves. We really need to keep some reserves.
In the HN discussion in which you posted a pointer to this discussion I referred to Bjørn Lomborg, "The Skeptical Environmentalist". Back before the release of the CRUtape Letters he believed moderate AGW was happening, but he advocates moderate local expenditures to deal with that (moderate at least when compared to the "take over the world's economy" proposals of the extreme warmists), and that we spend some serious money on targeted interventions that will clearly help a lot of people (e.g. as I vaguely recall one involves addressing a common vitamin deficiency).
Unless a threat is truly cataclysmic it's a mistake to focus on it to the exclusion of all else, and the extreme warmists are just one example of an advocacy group that thinks they've found the one problem we're facing.
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Well, one of the issues is magnitude: do we get, naturally or unnaturally, temperatures back to the level of the Medieval Warm Period or do we get a "cataclysm" (or do we get the next Ice Age, we are overdue one, and the same general group of people and some of the same people were warning of that before the '80s).
"Worth doing something" is nice and fine, but that "something" really needs to be connected to the probability of the risk. The extreme warmists want us to essentially spend all the world's disposable wealth on something that has at best a very shaky scientific foundation (cataclysm). It would be a real pity if we did that and it turned out we were entering the next Ice Age instead, or needed the money for some other greater threat instead (e.g. one of the ones mentioned in this discussion, like a megacaldera cutting lose). A maxim of warfare is that the side that tends to win in a battle is the one that is the last to commit its reserves. We really need to keep some reserves.
In the HN discussion in which you posted a pointer to this discussion I referred to Bjørn Lomborg, "The Skeptical Environmentalist". Back before the release of the CRUtape Letters he believed moderate AGW was happening, but he advocates moderate local expenditures to deal with that (moderate at least when compared to the "take over the world's economy" proposals of the extreme warmists), and that we spend some serious money on targeted interventions that will clearly help a lot of people (e.g. as I vaguely recall one involves addressing a common vitamin deficiency).
Unless a threat is truly cataclysmic it's a mistake to focus on it to the exclusion of all else, and the extreme warmists are just one example of an advocacy group that thinks they've found the one problem we're facing.