Climate Change

The main thing to remember when talking about the climate change issue, is that we are trying to keep it at a level we can live in.
Yes, the earth has constantly been hot, then cold in cycles. But we as a species would find it very difficult to survive at either extreme.
Earth Climate is very much based on carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases (that trap heat and make it worse).
As it has been in the past many times, Carbon dioxide was at far higher levels than they are now, and the earth was far hotter than it is now.

But we could not have survived as we are now in those conditions. That's the point that I think a lot of people are not seeing or intentionally looking past. The earth is in it's cycle, but we are accelerating said cycle.

Think of it like this, I'm assuming most of us either have children or grandchildren. If you ignore what is being asked and want to keep burning all fosil fuels and generally being wasteful with resources, can you honestly say to yourself that you are ok with said offspring having to live in a world where the world will once again be fighting with each other for resources? Water, farmable land, homes.
A good percentage of the population live near the coast, and as sea levels rise (which they are, we know this), those people will have to move.

Ultimately, global warming would probably be the best thing to happen to earth, as it would effectively kill off or at least limit it's biggest threat: Humans. The earth will survive, life will go on. Just not us.

The following picture sums it up nicely.



Finally, the argument "other countries aren't doing anything, so why should we" is bollocks. That'd be like saying "well, if it's good enough for Jimmy Saville, it's good enough for me."

On a lighter note, here's fun fact:
Genghis Khan, in fact, may have been not just the greatest warrior but the greatest eco-warrior of all time, according to a study by the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Energy. It has concluded that the 13th-century Mongol leader's bloody advance, laying waste to vast swaths of territory and wiping out entire civilisations en route, may have scrubbed 700m tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere – roughly the quantity of carbon dioxide generated in a year through global petrol consumption – by allowing previously populated and cultivated land to return to carbon-absorbing forest.

 

So maybe Mother Nature will come to the rescue with a plague and wipe out several billion people.

 

As I said before, it's happening. It will happen, and it's our problem. Like plastic in the oceans, it's our lives at risk... the Earth doesn't give a shit. It's been a molten ball of rock flying through space before, it would do it again. It's us that have to do things in order to keep our lives relatively similar.

Whether Attenborough is a hypocrite or not is almost besides the point. He may well be, but it doesn't stop the changing of precipitation patterns, subsequent droughts, and riots, and mass migration.

Don't lose sleep over it. Do what you can, or want to. We're all going to die anyway, and life is seemingly meaningless.

Incidentally, I am only into the first weeks of my motivational speaking course.

 

I know very little about climate change and that has only been accumilated by reading/watching the news and interestingly this thread. For me it is all about do we take the risk of killing the environment that our children and grand children will live in. Not knowing one way or the other which side of the argument is right, I say lets do what we can to minimise any potential impacts: what ever they maybe. This will ensure that my grand children will be able to live the kind of life that I have been privileged to enjoy....

 

This was a self described ‘explorer, advocate and visionary’ (so no false modesty eh?) getting his vision of ice free seas badly wrong.......

https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2017/08/31/pen-hadow-gives-up-blocked-by-sea-ice/

 

Like I said I know very little about climate change. But whether it is human behaviour or the natural cycle of the earth that is happening we need to adapt and if that means we have to do something to slow down the change, it would seem to make good sense.

 

I think air quality is something we should be more focussed on. Our governments did a lot promoting diesel to reduce CO2, the US and China did not, and now there's a huge Diesel problem across the whole of Europe.

Bring on motorbikes and V8 petrol motors

 

Heading home in a cloud burst this morning, complete with hail, I thought of you literary types and the opening lines of Chaucer’s Prologue to the Canterbury Tales:

Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote,
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote.....

Or in modern English

When in April the sweet showers fall
That pierce March's drought to the root and all.......

It was written in about 1387 as the Medieval Warm Period (hotter than now) was tipping into the Little Ice Age. Could have been written this morning......

 

My very g

I have a very well educated friend who is a geologist who specialises in this area and he says that its mostly environmentalist bullshit and, as andypandy said, its always been changing and always will, and its been much worse in the past, mother nature will cope, as always. Environmentalists should be more concerned with our personal health by campaigning against local authorities so called "traffic calming" that pollutes the air we breath by holding up traffic and should also be promoting personal, more environmentally friendly, forms of transport like motorcycles, and also stop taxing so much as this makes us all poorer and less likely to be able to afford newer cleaner transport; we can't all catch the bus and the trains are over capacity anyway when most people need to travel.

 

Emphasis is mine. This pretty much sums it all up. Mother nature will cope, it will adapt, it will survive. We humans won't. Modern human's will struggle to adapt quickly enough, many (or most) will die.
All species have evolved to adapt to their environment. Humans are better at adapting than most, but we can still only thrive in a very specific set of conditions. It's not just the climate itself, it's how the climate affects our habitat, such as access to water, food, shelter.
The mass extinctions of the past occur at a time when there has been a massive sudden shift in climate (of which had different causes). The dinosaurs died out because of the sudden drop in global temperatures caused by the dust and debris fallout from the asteroid impact suspended in the atmosphere blocking photosynthesis in plants. The earth survived, and thrived once again. Dinosaurs, not so much, other than what was able to adapt.
We will be much the same.
We need to get out of this mindset that humans and 'the earth' are one and the same. We are not. We are very different.

 

From what I've heard (the usual from a pal who spoke to a guy who knows somebody in the car trade), the majority of Audi Q3 E-tron cars in London that are exempt from the ULEZ charge because they are hybrids that have been traded in, the charging cable is still sitting pristine as new in it's bag in the boot.

Just because it's got battery power, doesn't mean to say you need to use it

 

Interesting how 52% in certain referendum is absolute majority and needs to be religiously followed and executed yet when 95% of the scientific world is saying we are accelerating the planets climate to a noticeable extend, it is somehow considered by some as a hoax and just another way of taxing the people..
Sorry wrong forum I know, and I won't go into that.

Here is my take.
Let's say they are all wrong, and we push and clean up our act as much as we can anyway.
The result is, we burn less fossil fuels, we try to use a lot more renewable energy, we plant more trees, we eat less mass produced beef and diary, we cycle more and fly a bit less, we support local products and try to produce a bit more ourselfs, we drive cars with smaller engines, we spend less time at work, earn less money, we buy less crap we don't need to impress people we don't know or like, and the list goes on..

Now let's say they are right yet we do nothing, the kids of our kids will suffer the consequences and everyone after them, because we felt it was all just a bull..and it was too much of hard work to do anything about it and almighty USA and China was not bothered so why should we..

We are fcuking this planet over like never before and with population growth out of hands it is about to get a lot worse, so personally, I think the least we can do is to consider this to be a real matter that needs action, we can only benefit from it without actually having to dramatically change our lives.

It is the small everyday decisions that will make the most difference.

Humans may not be single handedly causing it, but I do not need a Uni to see how big is the chance that we are helping it along quite noticeably by the way we live and treat this place..

If we can come together on this, surely it will make it possible to deal with other stuff like pollution, overfishing and other stuff that is killing our planet.

 

Nope even though I agree my first comment was unnecessary, I did apologised for it hough there and then.
The rest is just my take on global warming thats all.

 

The problem with ‘scientific consensus’ is funding research. It is virtually all government sponsored. If you challenge the justification for green taxes you will be about as welcome as a fart in a spacesuit. ‘Green’ taxes seldom are - there is no ‘hypothecation’.

Meanwhile the Met Office and various University research units engage in publicly funded academic love ins. It has become something of a self licking lollipop where objectivity, never mind challenge, is hard to find. ‘Peer review’ now means ‘us’ and healthy scepticism is ‘denial’ by ‘them’ who consequently struggle for research funding. Shuts down an inconvenient debate about unwelcome truths....