Questions and comments followed, including one final one from the professor. He indicated that I had perhaps overlooked something when questioning the paper's necessity: the fact that it was simply a doom & gloom paper. He was right. I hadn't really considered that its only real purpose of existence was to scare people.
I later figured why it was that this didn't occur to me: I'm an optimist. From the climate change perspective, I think we'll be OK in the long-run. That, or I'm a closet ignoramus, who chooses to think we'll be OK so I can continue living a relatively blissfully ignorant life. There's a fine line between the two.
I also asked myself the value of doom & gloom papers. To some they may seem counter-productive and silly, only getting in the way of achieving progress, in this case, to averting serious climate change.
Others might see them as fully necessary, keeping us on our toes by indicating what could happen if we get complacent.
The final spectrum might view them as realistic and defeatist. If the paper makes a good argument for our devastation, I guess we're screwed. We might as well just keep up what we're doing already because any change will be meaningless. This is a tad dangerous, but hey, I'm an optimist.
Is there a value to these papers? Sure, but it matters where it is seen from. In my personal opinion, I think the more extreme doom & gloom papers and studies are counter-productive, especially those that are defeatist and at the most, call for adaptive solutions. And maybe they're right, but I'm not at that point yet.
Plenty of literature out there accepts the perils and challenges of climate change. Those papers keep us on our toes and are completely necessary. But they're not defeatist.
I think we've got a fighting chance of saving ourselves from this climate change mess.
But then again, I'm only an optimist.
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