<aside> ⚠️ The readings included in this class may be particularly distressing. To reference our discussion and resources on climate grief, climate anxiety, and ecological grief, see 0.1 Welcome!
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This Section seeks to aid you in determining for yourself, "How bad is it really?" We hope your efforts to refine your answer to that question will allow you to have a more honest and fruitful conversation with yourself and others about how you'd like to act and the life you'd like to lead in the face of what you believe to be true.
This class aims to provide you an understanding of the range of narratives on the severity of climate change and ecological destruction, point you towards perspectives the instructors believe to be valuable, and build a few tools for gauging the trustworthiness of different perspectives. Our goal is not to conform class participants to one particular perspective.
However, we must acknowledge that we are only considering viewpoints that acknowledge Anthropogenic (man-made) climate change is occurring. In that regard, we are conforming class participants to one particular view. However, those coming to this course will have already arrived at that underlying conclusion, and it is a conclusion that has been backed by an overwhelming scientific consensus for over 40 years.
Finally, when it comes to predicting the future, believing any single prediction to be exclusively valid is simply a misguided and likely dangerous approach.
Ready? Here we go.
While not equally represented in mainstream media, public opinion, or scientific consensus, there is a diversity of opinions on the severity of climate change and ecological destruction. Using an overly simplistic approach, we choose to categorize the range of opinions as "Defeatist", "Alarmist", "Scientific Mainstream", "Relaxed", or "Excited". More detailed proposed definitions of those camps, including example articles, can be found in the Spectrum of Concern Sub-Page (optional reading).
The Excited camp believes climate change is improving the state of the world. While they may agree that it can exacerbate certain issues, on the whole, they argue, it is improving the world through things like better crop yields, fewer deaths from cold, access to previously inaccessible raw materials and fossil fuels. They believe significant efforts to mitigate climate change will cause more harm than good, by slowing the economy, or diverting resources away from more productive efforts to improve the world like eradicating disease, educating women, and tackling poverty.
The Relaxed camp believes climate change and ecological destruction are important problems worth addressing, but either posit that they are not as bad as the Scientific Mainstream indicates, or believes that human ingenuity, well-designed policies, and collective action is already or will be able to effectively mitigate any serious crisis. They hold that the scientific mainstream are the ones who are alarmist. Like the alarmist camp, they often pull from studies and findings that are both included and excluded from the IPCC's assessment.
The Scientific Mainstream is set by the consensus-based reports of the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which was formed in 1988 to organize the dispersed scientific understanding of climate change and communicate the scientific consensus to governments. The IPCC is the "Scientific Mainstream", simply because its reports are widely considered by governments, institutions, academia, and media to be reputable and authoritative. Since these actors wield political, economic, cultural, and educational influence, whatever they collectively endorse as reputable and authoritative will then be taken as reputable and authoritative by the general public.