IPCC: Was the scary report too conservative?

Click here to access article by Scott Waldman from E&E News [Energy & Environment News]

The U.N. climate report released this week had some stunning revelations, claiming that the 2020s could be one of humanity's last chances to avert devastating impacts.

But some say its authors were being too cautious.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report states in plain language that averting a climate crisis will require a wholesale reinvention of the global economy. By 2040, the report predicts, there could be global food shortages, the inundation of coastal cities and a refugee crisis unlike the world has ever seen. [my emphasis]

A number of scientists contend that the report wasn't strong enough and that it downplayed the full extent of the real threat.

The reality is that ordinary people, who are brainwashed to believe only the "authorities", don't read these reports, and mostly believe what their capitalist masters tell them via corporate media (and all their other institutions). What I wrote in yesterday's commentary is another illustration of this childish mentality:

The sad fact is that so many of us naively believed what we were told by adults in elementary schools and Sunday schools, and by our parents who were also steeped in capitalist propaganda since they were born. Later we were subject to this same indoctrination in movies and TV. Now many people find it hard to believe otherwise, to believe their own eyes and ears as our masters crank up their propaganda to new heights of deception and engage in censorship of information that counters their self-serving propaganda. A major problem for activists and independent thinkers is that those who uncritically accept this indoctrination are well rewarded by career opportunities in our master's corporations, government, academia, etc.

Environmental sustainability and the capitalist system are incompatible, but this glaring fact does not worry ordinary people because of their childish belief in their masters who are thoroughly addicted to the power and wealth that their system delivers to them. Like most addicts they prefer to have their supply of drugs than rather than life, and they don't care if the rest of us go down with them and the human species become extinct.