Apologies for a short thread:

Here is what bothers me about speaking of catastrophic climate change as if it were quantifiable and then debating what constitutes alarmism. 1/10

The impacts of Climate change are not equally distributed across the planet. For people like those on Tuvalu, living on a disappearing island, catastrophe is their lived experience. 2/10

And so catastrophe has to be judged in moral terms of human loss and suffering. 3/10

Global warming is catastrophic right now for every poor person in the Global South whose food insecurity is made worse by consequent climate change. 4/10

Debates over the word alarmist? To me, as a moral philosopher, are distractions from the pressing ethical catastrophe of climate change. 5/10

It is no more possible to be alarmist about climate change than it is to be alarmist about global poverty and disease. 6/10

If you are treating climate change as the urgent catastrophe that it absolutely already is then you are thinking of it in moral terms. If you are not, this is a moral blind spot that I hope you soon overcome. 7/10

Recognizing the moral nature of catastrophic climate change is not the same as doomism. Doomism is the mongering of helplessness, and my friend @MichaelEMann is right to condemn it as denialism. 8/10

Humanity can mitigate the catastrophic impacts of climate change. The question is how much human loss and moral suffering will we tolerate first. 9/10

We may benefit in some ways from having to deal with the current catastrophe. Not only in better greener infrastructures, but in better more cooperative politics. In the short term the U.S. must fix its broken politics for the sake of the entire world. 10/10