It's a bit warm/ wet/ cold outside

[The Enigmatic Dr X]

Climate change. What's to be done?

Read an article this morning saying that we are on track for a 3 degree increase by the end of the century if carbon emissions do not peak in 2020 and fall by 2030. It also says we have 18 months to do something about it (ie the end of 2020) because any relevant plan will take 10 years to implement.

Otherwise, 25% of species face extinction and the eco-system is fecked.

I don't think anyone disputes that. Action needs taken. But what?

The real issue for me is that the silent majority are too self-centred and short-termist. I am not sure I care (I know I should, I really do) about the extinction of beetles in Peru. And I think I am a fair-minded guy.

Thing is, it's not the end of the world. It's really not. What it is, though, is the end of a way of life.

Surely, the way to kick folk up the arse to do something is to point out the changes that they will need to make, and how much worse things will be the longer we take to do anything meaninful?

Focus not on extinction (which is bad, but which most folk I talk to just don't get moved by). Focus on the price of prosecco, the loss of bananas, the inability to fly to Marbs, the hike in clothing prices as cotton becomes more expensive, migrants fleeing their new-desert homes, the cost/ lack of fuel. Make it relevant to the masses.

[IAMTHESYSTEM]

There is a limited ability of humans to react to the impact of climate change. It would take an international effort unparalleled in human history to achieve a reduction in C02 outputs. Unfortunately, when co-operation is paramount, the rising sea levels will lead to an upsurge in prices for essential services like food. Combine that with refugees all looking to escape from countries affected by climate change, and you've got the exact opposite of what you need. A 'look after your own' idealism will arrive, and we see the first outposts in this coming attitude in Brexit and Trump's successful election. You can see the logic, therefore, why many of these 'Alter's' refute any action to stop or mitigate global warming. It's the gift that keeps on giving. As condition worsen producing ever-increasing numbers of refugees, you can use that to compound your grip on society. Fear of the unwashed hordes surging across poorly maintained borders strengthens your hand. Since these Alters are opportunistic, they need the right circumstances to establish and sustain themselves, and Climate change is that chance.

[CalHab]

The "Tragedy of the commons" effect also means that whenever we propose doing anything at home, someone will always pipe up "but what's the point when USA/China/Everyone else isn't doing that". It's a poisonous mindset that seeks to prevent anyone taking action.

[The Legendary Shark]

I don't think climate change can be stopped - the climate has been changing for billions of years and will continue to do so for billions more. The best we can do is mitigate by cutting down on pollution, building sea defences, building new settlements or planting forests where the glaciers used to be, building new fresh water reservoirs (in abandoned coal mines etc?) and such things.

Carbon tax is not the answer, or at least only a miniscule part of the answer. We have to adapt to the planet because we can't adapt the planet to us. Climate change is not a disaster, it's an opportunity.

[Hawkmumbler]

I don't think climate change can be stopped - the climate has been changing for billions of years and will continue to do so for billions more.

I don't believe the sentiment 'climate change is bad' has ever been the case, except when simplified for kiddies obviously, but instead 'climate change at the rate of visible degrees within years, not centuries, in bad and we're causing it'.

[sheridan]

The real issue for me is that the silent majority are too self-centred and short-termist. I am not sure I care (I know I should, I really do) about the extinction of beetles in Peru. And I think I am a fair-minded guy.

Yes, you should - even if you don't care about the hypothetical beetle itself, until a species dies out we don't really know what else was relying on it (even then we might not find out - the dependant species just has difficulties which we can't explain).

• Domino effects and secondary extinctions
• The marine version
• On exctinction leads to another... and another

[Colin YNWA]

I don't think climate change can be stopped - the climate has been changing for billions of years and will continue to do so for billions more. The best we can do is mitigate by cutting down on pollution, building sea defences, building new settlements or planting forests where the glaciers used to be, building new fresh water reservoirs (in abandoned coal mines etc?) and such things.

Carbon tax is not the answer, or at least only a miniscule part of the answer. We have to adapt to the planet because we can't adapt the planet to us. Climate change is not a disaster, it's an opportunity.

I rarely engage with this type of thing here BUT please for the love of all, don't confuse natural changes in climate that happen over long periods of time and the current human induced climate change that we are all responsible for creating and therefore solving.

They are entirely different things and to say otherwise is to side with climate denies such as Trump who look for any reason to spit their nonsense.

There is agreement in the scientific community

Weather is not the same as climate

The significent increase in overall temperature we are seeing globally in the last couple of hundred years (but most significently in the last 50) is due to human actions

[IndigoPrime]

There’s a great graph online that shows climate shifts since the era before the dinosaurs. Natural changes usually occur over many thousands of years. The spike humans have created is unprecedented and essentially a vertical line.

[Dark Jimbo]

I don't think climate change can be stopped - the climate has been changing for billions of years and will continue to do so for billions more.

I rarely engage with this type of thing here BUT please for the love of all, don't confuse natural changes in climate that happen over long periods of time and the current human induced climate change that we are all responsible for creating and therefore solving.

Yeah, that is probably the most unhelpful remark that can be made about climate change, Shark.

[TordelBack]

I don't think climate change can be stopped - the climate has been changing for billions of years and will continue to do so for billions more.

I rarely engage with this type of thing here BUT please for the love of all, don't confuse natural changes in climate that happen over long periods of time and the current human induced climate change that we are all responsible for creating and therefore solving.

Yeah, that is probably the most unhelpful remark that can be made about climate change, Shark.

Agreed, it's a literally fatal line of thinking, although note that Sharky goes on to say:

Carbon tax is not the answer, or at least only a miniscule part of the answer. We have to adapt to the planet because we can't adapt the planet to us.

This I can partly get behind. Carbon tax can be a part of the answer in two senses: it is a crude economic stick aimed at modifying behaviour by using a single simple metric, and that is a welcome and often effective approach; its revenues can be used to part-fund critical climate projects. But the Shark is entirely correct, it's a very small part of what's needed, and dangerously it overwhelmingly affects the poorer sections of the West, while making the high-consumption perks of wealth even more exclusive and desirable. (Imagine the joy of the rich to discover foreign travel has been returned to them and them alone!) This can and does reduce widespread support for current measures, gives opportunity to anti-fact demagogues, and creates an atmosphere that bodes ill for the reception of the savage economic pain that will be required very soon.

In the long term I think the 'stick' part of tackling climate change is going to have to factor in income and net worth: a basic level of carbon credits, with a increase in costs based on a  progressive proportion of real wealth, instead of a flat rate.

But I'd far rather see creative solutions that take account of what we can do individually and collectively, in the way of a radical change to lifestyle, economy, international aid and domestic land-use, rather than just what we have to pay.

[The Legendary Shark]

I don't deny that humanity is having an effect, the question is - how big an effect? It cannot be denied that climate is also effected by the Sun, cosmic rays, precession, orbital mechanics, volcanism, continental drift, the fact that the Earth is still emerging from the tail end of an ice age and so on. We have suffered such things as the medieval warm period and the little ice age, showing that climate can peak and trough on its own.  It's a very complex collection of variables. What seems unhelpful to me is to pin the whole shooting match on humanity's carbon usage.

There is so much we should be doing, like cutting emissions of more powerful greenhouse gases like methane and, most powerful of all, water vapour. Power stations belch out water vapour 24 hours a day - and surely it's not beyond the wit of man to condense it and put it into rivers, which help distribute and regulate atmospheric heat, or pump it into aquifers (or abandoned coal mines) to slake the thirst of towns and cities?

Stop chopping down forests and jungles without replacing the trees, stop bleeding toxins and plastics into rivers and oceans, interfering with their thermal properties and killing carbon and methane eating organisms.

Clean up jet exhausts, which emit tons of ozone depleting chemicals into precisely the part of the atmosphere where they do the most damage (there are, I think, now two holes in the ozone layer).

How about painting our cities black so they radiate less heat into the atmosphere? How about stopping burning all kinds of nasty chemicals and radioactive dusts by stopping bombing the crap out of each other?

It's a very complex set of variables, and I've only scratched the surface here, and we need to admit that focusing just on carbon is not going to help us. Carbon is just a figleaf applied by vested interests to protect their powers and profits. I for one do not trust the institution of government, which brought us the likes of Blair, Bush, Trump and now Johnson, to be either informed or honest about the problem. Just look how they back fraccing - they either don't believe the carbon story or they don't care. Either way, these clowns are not the best people to rely on when it comes to planning for the future, and if they say 'it's carbon,' we can be fairly sure it ain't the whole story.

Of course, I could be wrong but I really don't think I am, and what does it matter anyway? Say that cutting carbon emissions altogether solves the problem completely. Well, hurrah! And I'd be the first one to dance, but does this mean we shouldn't do any of the other things? And what if I'm half right and cutting carbon emissions only solves 50% of the problem? Or 5%? Or 0.5%? Shouldn't we be looking to building sea defences, husbanding our water supplies properly, employing altenatives to plastics, planning how to populate Antarctica once the ice has gone and so on and on, just in case?

If being skeptical of the carbon story - carbon emissions, carbon taxes, carbon trading - makes me a "climate denier" (what does that even mean, anyway? Someone who denies the existence of climate? A stupid title attached to anyone who criticises the official line, designed to stop any rational thought or debate before it even starts - like calling those who first tried to flag up the dangers of lead in petrol as "anti-fuel"), then I guess that's how I'll be labelled. But I'm not a climate denier really - I do believe that there is such a thing as a climate and I do believe that it's changing - but I don't believe that the official story put out by the vested interests is anything close to the whole truth, nor do I believe their proposed solutions are anything more than a single paragraph in the encyclopedia of things that need to be done.

[IndigoPrime]

I don't deny that humanity is having an effect, the question is - how big an effect?

It depends whether you believe the non-partisan research of over 99 per cent of climate scientists, or whack job blogs, I suppose. When you see graphs that plot the temperatures across MILLIONS of years, what you see is a gradual ebb and flow. When we rock up, there’s a straight perpendicular line upwards, causing the same level of change as in extinction events.

It's a very complex set of variables, and I've only scratched the surface here, and we need to admit that focusing just on carbon is not going to help us.

This, I agree with. We need a wholesale change in how we live. The question is, what are westerners prepared to give up?

As for doing this stuff, and the argument of hoax or it not being entirely necessary:

[JayzusB.Christ]

I don't deny that humanity is having an effect, the question is - how big an effect?

It depends whether you believe the non-partisan research of over 99 per cent of climate scientists, or whack job blogs, I suppose.

We've been here before.  I love the Shark like a brother, but for him it's the latter. 

[radiator]

That climate change/conservation has somehow become a partisan issue is one of the most depressing developments in recent years.

[Colin YNWA]

There is so much we should be doing, like cutting emissions of more powerful greenhouse gases like methane and, most powerful of all, water vapour.

Again apologies for getting involved in such matters but don't let the misinformation get out there. Couple of hopefully reliable sources to explain this issues

https://royalsociety.org/topics-policy/projects/climate-change-evidence-causes/basics-of-climate-change/

https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11652-climate-myths-carbon-dioxide-isnt-the-most-important-greenhouse-gas/

The more energy we all waste buying into doubt sown by parties interested in clouding the issue the less energy we have for sorting the real, identified and understood problem.