Trump and Trump supporters keep using the Y2K Fallacy, and it is driving me crazy

You are incorrect.The source was, in fact, James Hansen. His West Side Highway prediction assumed a 100% increase in CO2.
Examining Hansen's prediction about the West Side Highway
There's been about a 30% increase (so far) and the sea level rise measured (so far) is in centimeters, not tens of meters.
Climate Change: Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide | NOAA Climate.govYou would know this if you'd bothered to read my post
EvC Forum: Trump and Trump supporters keep using the Y2K Fallacy, and it is driving me crazySigh.Nobody reads my posts. I don't know why I bother posting.

I posted the sources at
EvC Forum: Trump and Trump supporters keep using the Y2K Fallacy, and it is driving me crazyI clearly wasn't implying they were some sort of consensus, merely pointing out that if you're going to try to persuade people to do something about the environment (which is a good thing to be doing, whether it involves reducing CO2 emissions or heavy metal pollution or agricultural nitrate runoff or . . . ) it helps if you're accurate, rather than hyperbolic.

It isn't an artificial distinction. EvC is fact-checked by its members, with links to the actual facts. You're misusing that image. The pigs started the "two legs bad" chant but then they became just like the two-legged villains. The equivalent would be EvC changing to become just like Facebook.Edited by ringo, : Srelling.

You mean like reason people out of their comfort zone ideas that climate change is a hoax? It's the sun, it's natural, burn baby burn is ok? Who needs spiders and wasps anyway? My 401k is full of big carbon cuz that's the best? It's slow and there's plenty of time? Message 118So scare the shit out of the stupid ones. They're going to watch it happening eventually anyway.Edited by AZPaul3, : No reason given.

Edited by AZPaul3, : No reason given.

If it helps get dumb peoples’ attention then hyperbole can be quite effective.Populations that are scared can lead to major social movements. Just ask the dictators past and present.Our global crisis is worse than we thought and deteriorating faster than we thought. People should be scared.Hyperbolic catastrophic climate dystopian memes need to be all the rage. If the fear engulfs the sheeple to the point of action then maybe we can forestall the worst of this for a few more centuries. Dystopian propaganda to the rescue. Thank you, Dr. Goebbels.There should be an established funded international Bureau of Hyperbole: Climate Division for funding dystopian disaster flix in Hollywood, Bollywood and all points in between. Propaganda pushes in textbooks, movies, videos, memes, tons of memes and then more memes. Scare the ever-loving’ crap out of people.Yeah, it intellectually hurts, but with the shape we’re presently in we gotta try everything.Now is the time for each to find their own motivations. You are a secondary character in a dystopian apocalyptic horror movie. Act like it.Edited by AZPaul3, : No reason given.

I think what you said earlier in Message 118 applies better: For those who are unaffected by facts and rational arguments, what's the right approach? If there's an approach that would convince them to do the right thing, would it be okay to use it even if it were totally untrue?It feels unethical, but if they're doing the wrong thing for untrue reasons, would it really be wrong to convince them to do the right thing for untrue reasons? Or do ethical considerations override?--Percy

As far as I can see, the "fact-checking" in both places consists of some posters looking at other peoples' posts and doing some research (or not, as the case may be) before making replies to dispute (or agree with) those posts.

Oh, by all means, scare them.But if the scary things you say turn out to be untrue, then you've shot yourself in the foot, haven't you?

If it feels unethical, it probably is. Besides, crying wolf (which is what inaccurate predictions are, really) is unlikely to convince anyone, isn't it?

The fact that somewhere not far off half of Americans believe that the Presidential vote was "stolen" and that QAnon (home of some of the world's most ludicrous conspiracy theories) is the bringer of The Real Truth (TM), rather suggests otherwise.

Then we will have saved the environment and humanity for nothing?What a bummer that would be.

And the funniest, but also scariest thing is that same bunch of Americans is always on the total bullshit side of every issue. It's as if their bullshit meter is wired backwards.

I wonder how many of the scientists studying climate and building weather and climate models, from the 1980s to the present, and who invented more and more ways to collect data and who are the same guys looking at the data and putting the data in their computer models, modified their predictions as they collected more and more data?I have not heard of a single climate expert who defends the predictions of their 1st model and does not keep testing it against newer data. The whole point in studying something like climate is understand it better and to keep improving our understanding.There are a lot of idiots out there who do not understand the concept of tentativeness of scientific predictions. I think they would be genuinely bummed out if humans globally cooperated to save whatever is left of the biosphere and humanity.Now the irony would be, if we managed to avert disaster, then the scary things you say turn out to be untrue.

Well of course it's unethical - that was how I framed the question. I posed a conundrum of how you justify doing good unethically, especially when battling the unethical and unscrupulous. What planet are you from? Anyway, welcome to Earth. More than half of Republicans believe Trump won the election, and a third of Americans believe Biden won through voter fraud. Trump supporting lawyers cried wolf in 60 courtrooms, Trump cried wolf to anyone who would listen, Republican enablers repeated the message ad infinitum, and it helped convince tons of people. Trump's favorite way of beginning a sentence is, "They're saying...", as in (paraphrasing) "They're saying tens of thousands of ballots were dumped in Philadelphia." Another Trump favorite is just flat out lying, as in "We were winning this election, and then the Democrats got to work and stole it from us."So in the face of this level of unethical behavior, what is the right response? As the saying goes, a lie circles the globe six times while the truth is still lacing its shoes. "This election was stolen from us," really gets people's blood boiling and travels fast, while, "This was one of the most well-run elections in our country's history," is soporific. And, "This video shows election workers just pulling boxes of ballots out from hiding places beneath tables," sounds very disturbing and draws a great deal of concern, while explaining that the boxes were the standard secure boxes for holding ballots until counted and that election workers were following standard procedures gets a big yawn.It was a hypothetical, and in reality probably not possible. I can't think of a way, ethically or not, to make an honest election sound more exciting than a stolen one.--Percy

I think it's a matter of there being basically two ways of knowing and they only know one. Similar to them being unable to understand education as being for learning about subject matter without having to believe in it because their form of "education" is solely for indoctrination (which demands belief in the subject matter).Science's way of knowing is to study something and learn about it. Anybody who has ever learned something knows that you don't get it right at first but rather have to keep at it until we get it right. That is especially true when you are conducting self-directed research, which is basically what science does.The other way of knowing is through revelation. Some authority tells you what's what and you accept it without question. It's perfect knowledge. In that system, there's no path to learning more and, even worse, that perfect knowledge can only become less perfect as it becomes corrupted over time.That is why creationists keep trying to "disprove" evolution by attacking what Darwin had written and had gotten wrong (eg, his not knowing about genetics). They don't realize that we've learned a lot since Darwin because their own way of knowing doesn't have that feature. The idea of learning more is completely foreign to them.So while they keep losing knowledge (as more and more of their "perfect knowledge" decays away), we just keep learning more and more. 
ABE:
This subtopic reminds me of a cartoon that I've saved away somewhere.At an Al Gore presentation, one person in the audience turns to another and says, "But what if we save the planet and improve our lives immensely and it turns out to all be for nothing?"Edited by dwise1, : ABE