I think you are talking past each other based on different assumptions. Your thinking is directed at preventing climate change from creating massive coastal catastrophe and a monumental disaster to civilization. Greenman is looking at how we will manage the crisis because, unlike you, he believes it is already too late to prevent it, that we will not make the changes required to prevent what we are already well into experiencing. I would suggest that rather than calling him dumb for describing what he thinks will happen if we are indeed already fucked, because if we are we will absent extinction some how manage to carry on, that you argue the idea that it may in fact not be too late and that whatever it takes to prevent an epic man made climate disaster will be far far better than if we do nothing.
I saw an article somewhere that MIT has found an answer which I did not yet read and I am confident science can produce and already knows ways to both prevent and mitigate a pending 200 foot sea level rise. But as with everything, those who know how to solve problems have to sell them to those who haven't a clue because they do not have expertise in the requisite scientific fields.
Vic posted a video that suggests why conservatives and liberals talk past each other. My readings on scientific studies of liberal conservative differences suggest what I think are similar implications, but with the differences between liberals and conservatives far from black and white but by statistically apparent degree. The common factor relates to the brain scans of self-confessed liberals and conservatives that reveal differences in size of parts of the brain related to the emotional response of fear and the part of the brain that suppresses fear interfering with rational thinking. Enough fear and liberals start acting like conservatives.
These studies point to the ego, the sense of self interest, self security and self needs that in conservatives are more likely than in liberals to threaten positive notions of ones self free of fear. Conservatives react more strongly to ideas thoughts and experiences that threaten their state of ego well being, rationalizing away more than liberals generally do anything that threatens that state. The disaster that climate change represents would certainly be one of them.
Now all of that is well and good in terms of what we can see about liberals and conservatives talking past each other, but what do we really know about fear. What is it that we actually fear. That, I believe, is the question that never gets seriously asked because the only way to really know what you fear is to go through that fear and experience it. I suggest that has been done by some and the answer is that what we fear is to remember when we learned to fear, the experience of having been made to feel worthless and unworthy of love, of having experience the violence of physical punishment and verbal rejection via put-downs.
It is a world class hobby of people to separate into groups for herd safety, projecting that self hate out there onto others and seeing in them the threat they will somehow or another get back at you for your hatred of them by hating and punishing you.
Personally, I believe that not only do we possess the scientific know how to save ourselves from the ultimate climate disaster headed our way but that also we could, with the right self understanding, begin a long journey to better mental health. Guess which problem will provoke greater fear for the ego.
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