You're misrepresenting what GP said. They didn't say "experts", they said:
> all the people who have made confident predictions over the years regarding global warming.
You can't deny that most of the people speaking publicly, and by far the loudest people, are not experts, they are politicians, journalists, and filmmakers. (And tech entrepreneurs...) Many of those have predicted disasters that never happened.
But judging by the downvotes, I guess that's an inconvenient truth.
No, journalists and politicians are misrepresenting what the IPCC says. The IPCC are not alarmists, and they aren't predicting "The world is going to end in 12 years."
The actual report is far more balanced. Yes, they are predicting some negative consequences, alongside potential benefits and measures for adapation and mitigation.
Why would you link to the fifth edition of the report instead of the (complete) sixth edition or the in progress work now?[1]
Of course the IPCC doesn't predict the world is going to end in 12 years. That's a strawman - I'm sure you can find someone who has predicted the world will end in 12 years, but that isn't the disaster people are concerned about.
Instead, they collect five key "reasons for concern" by "using the following specific criteria: large magnitude, high probability, or irreversibility of impacts; timing of impacts; persistent vulnerability or exposure contributing to risks; or limited potential to reduce risks through adaptation or mitigation." [2]
Some of the risks associated with these include:
Risk of death, injury, ill-health, or disrupted livelihoods in low-lying coastal zones and small island developing states and other smallislands, due to storm surges, coastal flooding, and sea level rise.
...
Risk of food insecurity and the breakdown of food systems linked to warming, drought, flooding, and precipitation variability and extremes,particularly for poorer populations in urban and rural settings.
I don't think the sixth edition of the assessment report is complete. It's "AR6 Climate Change 2021" so I assume it will be released next year. But if it's available somewhere, let me know.
"The world is going to end in 12 years..." is a recent famous quote by a prominent Democrat. I'm surprised you haven't heard it.
Personally, I bought into the climate alarmism about 30 years ago, and my skepticism is based on seeing so many things I've heard and read (even from scientists) turn out to be exaggerated.
>The world is going to end in 12 years..." " is a recent famous quote by a prominent Democrat.
This isn't true, and you should probably cut whatever source told it to you out of your life. The world is going to end if we don't take action within 12 years, which is the gist of what the IPCC report says.
My quote is literally what she said. (She later claimed it was "dry humor plus sarcasm")[1]. Perhaps she meant something more like what you said.
It doesn't matter.
"The world is going to end if we don't take action within 12 years" is also false, and not at all what the IPCC report says. When O'Rourke said something similar, the AP fact checked the claim:[2]
> THE FACTS: There is no scientific consensus, much less unanimity, that the planet only has 12 years to fix the problem.
> “This has been a persistent source of confusion,” agreed Kristie L. Ebi, director of the Center for Health and the Global Environment at the University of Washington in Seattle. “The report never said we only have 12 years left.”
And no, I'm not going to cut the AP and PBS out of my life just because some alarmists are delusional.
You don't appear to have read the things you linked. The argument Ebi is making is that we shouldn't give up if we don't hit that 12 year deadline, because it's continuous, and things keep getting even worse. She's trying to communicate that there are worse things than 1.5C that we could still prevent.
If your quibble is with the precise definition of "the end of the world" and not with the rest of the statement then I think we're well outside of what concrete facts can resolve. The impacts of 1.5C are going to be horrific. The fact that the impacts of 2, 3, 5, 5C are more horrific doesn't change that.
> journalists and politicians are misrepresenting what the IPCC says.
And the IPCC Summary for Policymakers itself misrepresents what the actual science says. All of the caveats, disclaimers, hedges, and so forth in the scientific working group reports (and even more so the caveats, disclaimers, hedges, etc. in the actual peer-reviewed papers on which the working group reports are based) are ignored in the Summary for Policymakers. The policy recommendations are already determined and published before the scientific working group reports are released.
So there are actually three levels of misrepresentation involved: first the IPCC WG reports misrepresent the actual primary sources; then the IPCC SPM misrepresents the WG reports; then journalists and politicians misrepresent the IPCC SPM. At each stage the predictions get more alarmist and the recommendations get more draconian.
> it is the scientists that have predicted the disaster, with an overwhelming consensus
No, they haven't. The IPCC reports are political documents, not scientific documents. One key fact that shows this: the Summary for Policymakers is written and published before any of the Working Group reports, and the Working Group reports then have to be edited and massaged to be consistent with what the Summary for Policymakers says. A true scientific report with scientific predictions would be the other way around: first you would write, review, and publish the scientific analysis and predictions, and then you would write, review, and publish the policy recommendations.
> all the people who have made confident predictions over the years regarding global warming.
You can't deny that most of the people speaking publicly, and by far the loudest people, are not experts, they are politicians, journalists, and filmmakers. (And tech entrepreneurs...) Many of those have predicted disasters that never happened.
But judging by the downvotes, I guess that's an inconvenient truth.