No Stupid Questions

Climate scientist here: what is there to reconcile? Slowing and eventually stopping warming is definitely possible, even inevitable, the question is just when and how fast we can do it, and what the repercussions are. Every fraction of a degree warmer is worse, so we should be taking as much mitigation action as fast as we can. Mitigating earlier is better than adapting later.

Yes they have already reconciled that it is already happening now. They are figuring out how to stop it so that all life on Earth doesn’t go extinct…

If you mean inevitable due to lack of global action, then yeah because that's how most models present eventual societal collapse.

If you mean because its too far gone, that's not true. There's still time to mitigate the issues we've created, but the effort required increases every year, and there's not enough being done about it.

Reconcile what exactly? Scientists give the info, if people don't act on it ... What are you expecting researchers to do about it?

I had to reckon with this as a civic-minded class of 2000, we got the early digital everything and they had such fanfare for bringing us up, and into the future, a gateway to a new generation - and as kids, we had media for 20 years telling us something had to change - they told us Millennials were going to solve the looming problems of the past. But then we found out the world didn't really want those changes, and we burned out like Great Value Incandescents. Then it was several years of "how do I plan a retirement against the coming climate wars..." and then the Great Despair where I just did drugs for several years and gave up,

Uhhhh.... they've been warning us for many decades, now? (and sounding alarms)

There's also the fact that Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius (and others) discovered key mechanisms of the Greenhouse Effect, and CO2's key role in such, back in the 1800's. So you know, want to know about a science issue? Maybe ask literal scientists?

It's not the body of relevant scientists that are letting us down, Dafty...

It's been settled for 20 years that the world is warming. The efforts at this point are entirely focused on containing and limiting the damage. The fight to stop it is long over, and there's absolutely nothing that can stop some level of catastrophic damage.

Is going to? It's already happening. We've seen increased heat stroke deaths. We've seen animal populations get displaced.

Yes, constantly.

Most people, imo, don't have a good idea who the scientific community is and what their discussions look like. The scientific community is made up primarily of working class nerds who work at universities and suppliers and contract companies, and they communicate through blog and magazine articles in publications by and for other academics.

If you go to a scientific conference, you'll see talks and panels on this subject and it's a routine topic at coffee breaks and drinks in the evenings.

The scientific community has been discussing this topic literally longer than anyone else.

The place to read that would be the latest IPCC reports https://www.ipcc.ch/

They can either give up, or keep trying. Which would you do?

"Scientific Community" is kind of a broad term. It is composed of a lot of smarty-pants types who are unlikely to take "no" for an answer, and will keep trying to fix the problem.

In the end, you may be right, and there's no way to stop the runaway train, and all these folks will accomplish is getting our hopes raised while they earn their PhD's and present papers in worldwide conferences they all burned jet fuel to get to.

But, what if you turn out to be wrong, and one of those poindexters actually figures out how to scrub CO2 from the atmosphere in an economical fashion, and they manage to stop the train? That person will be instantly famous, and the Nobel Prize might be the least of their accolades. They will be remembered as one of humanity's greatest minds. If they happen to be British, they will be buried next to Newton and Darwin, that's how important it will be.

So, they will keep trying, because it's as close as you can get in this life to immortality.

There are different fields of science. In my field (water resources), any scientist that is reasonable knows the climate change is happening, you can see it in any data that spans for last 50 years. We're focused on how to deal with it, given it'll get worse. All the future scenarios (from simulations) are worse than history, there's less worse and more worse depending on how people will act. But I think even the worst case did not have "world war" into consideration. So we might have wayy worse than our predictions. But again, predicting future is hard, there could be effects that we're not expecting. Specially the current geopolitical scenario when climate change (and greed) is making life hard leading into authoritative regimes which is making it worse on top of previous policies. Which exceeds the linear growth pattern used in the simulations.

As others said, it's generally a routine thing. I did once see a Mastodon post from a climate scientist, where they expressed that they're losing hope.
If that's the kind of reconciling you're talking about, I imagine every climate scientist has gone through that, but it's something they tend to deal with individually rather than stating it publicly.

The problem is that you don't want to give the public the impression that it's hopeless. Fossil fuel corporations will use that against you. And it just does not make rational sense.
Any amount of greenhouse gas that we don't put into the atmosphere makes our lives easier. Even if you give up hope for some particular goal, you would still want to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as much as possible, so that it doesn't become worse sooner.

Climate change already affects our lives. We really don't want it to become worse sooner.

Well for example, I read they’re harvesting coral samples so we can try to regrow the coral reefs in the future.

Yes, scientists have reconciled with this. In fact, climate change is now an outdated term; it is called climate collapse, and scientists (across many disciplines), most (rational, non-populist) politicians and citizens acknowledge that the dramatic effects are omnipresent.

The seeming lack of stopping it is a problem or economics or psychology or maybe even simple biology. I only rate one of those as 'science' though, two of them are grift/jargon. Physics and engineering meanwhile has done vastly more to accelerate it than to slow it down - and those dudes are way better at getting funding.

I think half the physicists sniff their own farts and convince themselves of their moral duty to deplete the earth's resources, so that they can tell themselves they're working on the building the USS enterprise to save mankind, whilst actually they're pumping rocket fuel into doodlebugs.