While I find the know-nothing right-wing as mendacious as ever, with regard to subjects like climate change, our society as a whole has a great bit of difficulty coming to terms with the idea and even more so the implications.

Most reporters use the “IPCC” as a crutch, not realize or not caring that the IPCC doesn’t really do research itself, and as far as research is concerned is useful mostly in coordinating disparate research worldwide.

Notice how few news reports cite the source of information, and if they do any citation it will be “IPCC”.

I’m waving my hands in generalities here… but most writers on the subject in the popular media really don’t have the first clue about climate change (as with most technical subjects.)

The current political approach to emphasis the “now” in climate change sounds good to political operatives but I think will backfire, because the hard truth is that our lives are quite short compared to the changes on the surface of the planet around us. No one alive today in Florida, for example, will have to worry about Florida being flooded out of existence. Yes, during the next millenium south Florida will slip under the waters of the Gulf of Mexico. I expect our current society to have undergone at least an economic, if not also political, collapse by then.

That’s why I linked the Auk article - we’ve been at global life-web destruction for millennia, but only with the industrial revolution have we scaled up our destruction to where we can affect the globe within a couple of centuries. Previous extinctions were more or less regional, now we are eliminating life planetary-wide.

It’s not a story that sells to the crowd, who are more interested in race cars and sex - forms of immediate gratification - than in big picture, civilization scale issues.