Pretty much everyone knows that climate change is happening and that we should be doing something about it (not that that translates to much action).
The IPCC keep publishing reports like this mainly in an effort win over 'skeptics'.
[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20121227101314/http://www.futuret...
To say "it's irreversible now" is to imply there was ever a point that it wasn't, a point at which there was something we could have done to change trends at this scale. The links you gave don't really suggest this to be the case.
BTW, David Suzuki is a fearmonger with a long history of making ridiculous unscientific doomsday claims. For instance, he claimed that a second Fukushima disaster would force evacuation of the west coast of America:
http://news.nationalpost.com/2014/01/20/david-suzuki-regrets...
So if you really want to claim the earth is likely to be "uninhabitable in only some decades" you probably want to use somebody else as a source.
In context, the most recent IPCC reports confirm earlier impressions that the likely costs of climate change are relatively small compared to the benefits of economic growth over the same period whereas the cost of doing much about climate change now is much larger than the cost of doing nothing. So even if we chose to get "stirred", what would you have us do about it?
Lomborg gives a few relevant numbers here:
http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/bj-rn-lomborg-sa...
First time I hear about Lomborg. Will read later.
Sure, if you're listening to people like David Suzuki you'd have that impression. But on the other side there are people like Chris Landsea - here was his resignation letter from the IPCC:
http://cstpr.colorado.edu/prometheus/archives/science_policy...
The IPCC's charter is to tell us about risks related to climate change. Not the benefits. If there weren't any risks or we were fully informed about them, the IPCC would have no institutional reason to continue to exist. So naturally it focuses on the latest big scary "we just noticed THIS risk!" stories and puts much less emphasis on "it turns out we were wrong about THAT risk!" stories. For all we know, each new report could be exactly the same as the last one in terms of the net overall danger documented and it would still look like things were "getting worse", because areas where things are "getting better" generally aren't mentioned or are soft-pedaled.
For instance, the IPCC once tried to claim a high certainty that there'd be more hurricanes in the future due to climate change (see Landsea's letter linked above), but now they either don't make such claims or assign them a much lower certainty level. The IPCC once claimed Himalayan glaciers would be gone by 2035 ( http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/jan/20/ipcc-hima... ); that turned out to be a mistaken claim based on grey literature. If there were some sort of a rundown in each report listing all the ways things "are worse" AND all the ways things "are better" since the last one it'd be easy to keep score. But there isn't, and the summaries and press releases emphasize any mentioned "this is worse" stories because bad news travels fast.
Suzuki complains that the IPCC report doesn't focus on the loss of arctic sea ice, but if they DID mention sea ice, they might have to mention that overall sea ice levels worldwide are currently above the long-term (30 year) average because we've gained more sea ice cover in the antarctic than we've lost in the arctic. And so on. (Given a big, complicated planet you can always find SOME areas or trends that seem to be "getting worse" but that doesn't mean throwing them - and only them - into the mix would make the report more accurate.)
- Most major governments are ineffective, if not corrupt. - We put almost no resources into educating our children. - It's pretty clear we've broken the planet (or are breaking it fast) - The masses are confused, and feel helpless. - The world economy appears to have been subjugated by central banks. - Our food is progressively getting more toxic. - Corporations (in general) have scraped together too much power. - It's 2014 - this is not the world we had dreamed of, it's lame, inefficient and generally run by emotionally immature, tiresome, short sighted people. - Many people have given up at some level.
OP your point is valid, but I think (in some way) some of us are just thinking 'f-- it, let it roll, we deserve it'
Disclaimer: I have not given up, I think things will get better - perhaps naive
If there isn't anything I can personally do to resolve it and it's a slow barely visible change, I'll sit quietly and hope for some of the worlds governments to fund a viable solution.
