Who else is involved?
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We are already in the middle of a mass extinction that will be readily apparent in our fossil record.
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Things are already bad. Any model saying things will be “not that bad” is failing to measure the present.
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Every new climate report admits that previous models underestimated where we are, much less where we are going. The latest horrifying news is that we have dramatically underestimated the rise in ocean temperatures, which a little physics will tell you is an order of magnitude more important than atmospheric temperature.
The thing I don’t get about the “there will be some problems” analysis is by what mechanism to people think the hockey stick is going to level off? We have a pretty good idea of what point in global warming we all die, because it’s happened before, and the current trend is pointed directly at that mark. As I pointed out above, there are no natural processes that still mitigate this, in fact we are rapidly approaching a situation where natural processes start to exacerbate it. So what possible analysis says, “Oh, it’s going to cost us $X billion a year, but that’s it.”
I don’t mean to sound as aggro as I probably do, but I think these are cases of scientific “caution” effectively misinforming people.
And if you think this extreme conservatism in interpreting research is some sort of scientific requirement, rather than the fact that climate scientists have been very effectively intimidated by conservative media, you’ve never read a paper on genetics or cancer research.
