Did Setting a Timeline Doom the Fight Against Global Warming?

>Did Setting a Timeline Doom the Fight Against Global Warming?

No.

I also see no evidence in the article it has hurt attitudes either way. In fact, polls show general concern about climate change. Doing something is another matter[0], but people are mindful of it. Nonetheless, the article seems to be more about the author's personal feelings than whether it influenced the movement around it either way.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-climatechang...

If you want to figure out how to do something, you have to take pure selfishness as granted - that's how people and society works; huge parts of sociology, economics, political science, etc are about structures and processes that allow to get large scale coordination and results despite lots of pure selfishness involved.

If any proposed solution (to climate change or anything else) relies on huge numbers of people not exhibiting pure selfishness, then it's not a solution but wishful thinking disconnected from reality. We have a good idea on how large groups of homo sapiens function. Selfishness is unavoidable. There will be lots of great unselfish, heroic, altruistic exceptions, but the mass behavior will still be overwhelmingly selfish in aggregate.

People trying "to hold on tighter to their already disappearing lifestyle" is a very important factor that needs to be taken into account for any calls to action. This is what's happening already and this will be happening - and I'm not pointing out this as something that "needs" to change; it kind of does, but it doesn't matter if it "needs" to change because it will not change, I'm pointing it out as something that's inevitable, people will try to hold on tight to unsustainable lifestyles (and fight to gain unsustainable lifestyles that they never had but others did) and any proposed solution needs to work despite that trend in order to be plausible and feasible.

> The solution to climate change is not governments and politicians and lawyers. It’s engineers. It’s always been engineers.

As long as politicians continue to play their games, engineers won't be able to accomplish anything. Solving this problem requires a widespread increase in enlightenment, and as far as I can tell a vast majority of the population thinks that only applies to people of the other political/religious persuasion, but it really applies to all of us.

It _is_ a political issue. The technology already exists--courtesy of the scientists/engineers of course. Whether that technology is deployed is a problem of politics.

For example, if the price of fossil fuels reflected its true cost to society--think climate change, extreme weather, stronger storms, droughts, ocean acidification, etc--then fossil fuels would be prohibitively expensive compared to renewable or nuclear energy. This is what a carbon tax is, and it's what many scientists and economists have been pushing for decades now. But they've been fighting a losing battle against the oil and gas lobby, and one party in particular that is wholly captured by them.

In fact, James Hansen, NASA scientist and head of the Goddard Institute, got out of the science to focus specifically on the politics. He urges people to join the Citizens Climate Lobby, which has lobbied for carbon pricing legislation for over a decade now: the Energy Innovation Act has bipartisan support in Congress right now (https://energyinnovationact.org/). Many other scientists are involved in the politics these day as well (Katherine Hayhoe [atmospheric scientist], Michael Mann [climatologist]).

I was alive in the 1970s when folks like the Club of Rome declared we'll all be dead form overpopulation and Malthusian collapse by the year 2000. Those self-same folks told us this century the arctic will be completely ice free by 2013. In the 1980s, others predicted our total demise due to acid rain and ozone depletion.

Mean time, people are making good progress on both feeding the masses and curbing the exponential growth of humanity across the globe. At the same time, clear progress is happening on the reduction-of-greenhouse-gas-emissions front. Acid rain and ozone depletion have been curtailed.

We'll always have doomsayers, extremists, and prophets. They're so busy with themselves they rarely get in the way of people who actually get work done.