Kent PitmanThis underscores a point I try to make from time to time, when I sound more bearish about the future of humanity than the climate scientists are: What threatens humankind is more than just the first-order effects of Climate.
You see Trump and others characterizing the Climate movement as a fear that we will drown from sea level rise. That's not the risk. There are secondary and tertiary risks, such as crop failures and consequent famine. But migration of animals of all kinds will happen, and some of those animals are as small as mosquitos.
This means that climate scientists are not the only experts we should be talking to in order to understand the climate problem. Diseases, insects, crops, etc. will become increasingly important. Not only are climate experts at risk of experiencing "Peter Principle" effects if they stretch too far, pretending expertise in areas they don't have, but we as a public will be blind to important dimensions of risk analysis that only an expert in these other fields would see.
In effect, it means that if a climate expert tells you about a certain set of risks, they are almost necessarily low-balling that risk for lack of ability to cover the space. And it means we as a public are planning timelines that are way too generous.
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