I abhor this kind of language that news sites use. It takes away from the seriousness of the underlying cause (and its effects), and associates hot/warm weather with "good". Public apathy towards climate change starts here.
> Is it heartless to think of those people in the future?
Silver lining and all that.
Furthermore, it’s generally untrue that any particular warm October is due to climate change but rather the average October temperature over many years.
We should avoid the association between climate and short term weather phenomenon altogether.
And yes, the COVID lockdowns showed the limits of individual action on climate change. Even if people can't leave their house (except for some limited purposes) the reduction in carbon emissions are relatively small. It's a problem for government and industry to solve in the main. The only difficulty is how to ensure that we elect governments who take it seriously without scaring some people?
Climate change results in more extreme weather, both warm and cold. So a particularly cold winter can be a result of climate change as well.
You can say something like over the last decade droughts are 32% more frequently than in the previous decade but just tacking it arbitrarily on to any reporting about a particular weather event is misleading.
Would anything have been any better, if I felt miserable about things, I cannot really change?
What's galling about the stupidity of mass media is their ability to spin a story by focusing on 4 weeks, without any scope or informed consideration of a bigger picture.
You're trying to make me fill guilty for enjoying nice weather? Really? Well, how do you feel about advocating for literally more dead people in the foreseeable future?
And before you try bringing doomsday scenarios into that, no official prediction I've read supports a Venus-like scenario. On the other hand, simply by following current trends in 50 years we'll have massively increased resources and tech: great batteries, probably fusion, AI, efficient carbon capture and the cheap power to do it etc. So by pushing against climate change now, when we're still relatively poor and primitive, you just divert resources from growth and end up killing more people than needed.
I think this might be important to mention
Most of the world indeed does not live in the US or Europe
This is a new level of madness from the fight against the fight against climate change.
Don't look up, my friend.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5...
> 8·52% were cold-related and 0·91% were heat-related [...] Eastern Europe had the highest heat-related excess death rate and Sub-Saharan Africa had the highest cold-related excess death rate.
Or look here and show me the disasters we're likely to have: https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/chapter/spm/ Cause a see a bunch of "not good", but I somehow fail to see any "billions will die". Or is that not an official enough source for you?
But yeah, it's easy to say "delusional" and drop a bunch of scary words without context. Drought is the thing farmers deal with every few years for literally over 10 millennia. Fires? Extreme weather? yeah, we have that, daily. Without putting some numbers on that it's just fearmongering. But putting numbers makes your position vulnerable - because on one hand global warming does have some good effects, and also wealth and tech more than compensate the ill-effects. For example you may find numbers on extreme weather increasing - but if you look at people affected by it, it's steadily going down. Not exactly the picture you're trying to paint with the scary words.
You're linking the 1.5 degrees warming report, which is already known to be an impossible target, the warming we'll reach if we stop carbon emissions completely by 2050; 2 degrees is the new target. We are nowhere near to being on track for such a goal, so you should actually look at the 3+ degrees predictions.
I should admit that I was somewhat wrong to bring up droughts - the report is much more concerned with flooding. I also forgot one of the most catastrophic predictions - the melting of the polar ice caps and resulting ocean level increase - but I suppose that's also a net positive in your book, somehow.
Regarding the increased frequency of extreme weather, the reports are again very clear [0]:
> It is virtually certain that hot extremes (including heatwaves) have become more frequent and more intense across most land regions since the 1950s, while cold extremes (including cold waves) have become less frequent and less severe, with high confidence that human-induced climate change is the main driver14 of these changes. Some recent hot extremes observed over the past decade would have been extremely unlikely to occur without human influence on the climate system. Marine heatwaves have approximately doubled in frequency since the 1980s (high confidence), and human influence has very likely contributed to most of them since at least 2006.
> It is likely that the global proportion of major (Category 3–5) tropical cyclone occurrence has increased over the last four decades, and it is very likely that the latitude where tropical cyclones in the western North Pacific reach their peak intensity has shifted northward; these changes cannot be explained by internal variability alone (medium confidence).
> Human influence has likely increased the chance of compound extreme events18 since the 1950s. This includes increases in the frequency of concurrent heatwaves and droughts on the global scale (high confidence), fire weather in some regions of all inhabited continents (medium confidence), and compound flooding in some locations (medium confidence).
[0] https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6...
> But putting numbers makes your position vulnerable - because on one hand global warming does have some good effects, and also wealth and tech more than compensate the ill-effects. For example you may find numbers on extreme weather increasing - but if you look at people affected by it, it's steadily going down.
I really doubt you can find numbers of people suffering more than 20 years ago. You might be tempted to say that it isn't fair, that the developing countries are a lot less poor now - a lot less starving children in Africa, China is middle class and so on. Which is exactly the point - industrialization is more than compensating for anthropogenic changes, and it keeps doing that at an accelerated rate. I don't think raising ocean level is a good thing, but I do have to point out that Netherlands is dealing with sea level a lot better than West Africa would - and in another 50 years West Africa should be where Netherlands is now.
Anyways, I'm not against limiting climate change. I am very much against knee-jerk reactions like the OP, because they do real harm. Post-Covid Europe went ahead and pushed climate legislation, ignoring the pandemic and the economic crisis that was already peeking from around the corner. They cut a lot of slack from the system, and the next shock sent energy prices and inflation soaring.
A more informed and balanced policy would have prevented that. But comments that call an opposing view as "delusional" aren't really helping on the informed and balanced front.