Yes, I both can and do do math, "Humans are very bad at reasoning about things that happen at earth scale and over long periods of time" is not a true let alone useful statement. Although I'll grant it's demonstrably true of the doomsayers who made and continue to make such confident predictions while not accounting for many things, most especially human ingenuity (look at Paul Ehrlich for example).
They tend to have little or no grasp of the market mechanism ... well, they tend to be central controller types, without realizing the information theoretic limitations of that approach. For example, when faced with externalities, they invariably go high without even considering low (one example I remember reading was some European country requiring plant water intakes being downstream of outflows, and that's about as simple as you can get).
Anyway, one of my points there is that the demonstrated inability of those guys to predict the future should not be extrapolated to the rest of us ^_^.
Plus we haven't tapped the tiniest fraction of the the Solar System's resources, and much of the Earth's remain their for the picking, at some cost in money, and as of late in the West, to the fashion sense of our elites (although I grant you coal is nasty stuff).
Yeah, some day we'll run out of resources in the Solar System, but that's so so far in the future, we probably have to worry more about the Singularity, or too many nuclear wars ... see The Moat In God's Eye for a look at that, which has one co-author who thought well and deeply of the '70s Limits to Growth garbage. (And even took advantage of it to be able to write more realistic SF, if you freeze most scientific developments....)
Ethically speaking, what should developed nations do to assist people living in, for example, sub-Saharan Africa, who have no resources with which to relocate, and are already suffering the consequences of climate change? I consider it a catastrophic situation, even though I'm personally not among the sick, dying, or refugees. I don't think it's fear-mongering to acknowledge the massive harm industrial nations are causing to real human beings, and to demand solutions of policy-makers, even if those solutions are costly.
They tend to have little or no grasp of the market mechanism ... well, they tend to be central controller types, without realizing the information theoretic limitations of that approach. For example, when faced with externalities, they invariably go high without even considering low (one example I remember reading was some European country requiring plant water intakes being downstream of outflows, and that's about as simple as you can get).
Anyway, one of my points there is that the demonstrated inability of those guys to predict the future should not be extrapolated to the rest of us ^_^.
Plus we haven't tapped the tiniest fraction of the the Solar System's resources, and much of the Earth's remain their for the picking, at some cost in money, and as of late in the West, to the fashion sense of our elites (although I grant you coal is nasty stuff).
Yeah, some day we'll run out of resources in the Solar System, but that's so so far in the future, we probably have to worry more about the Singularity, or too many nuclear wars ... see The Moat In God's Eye for a look at that, which has one co-author who thought well and deeply of the '70s Limits to Growth garbage. (And even took advantage of it to be able to write more realistic SF, if you freeze most scientific developments....)