Legitimate question: will there be a point where we speak about this war in the past tense, as in `The world lost the war against climate change'? How do we determine that turning point?
The vast majority of people who believe climate change will have large negative consequences make no major changes to their lifestyles. As someone who rides bike for transportation largely to save money and stay in shape (I think climate change is a lost cause), the environmental crowd seems to think I am doing something saint-like. But it really isn't anywhere near as difficult as they believe. They rarely adopt cycling to work, and at least part of the reason why seems to me that their environmentalism is not entirely sincere. This is speculation, but I think most people stop at signalling that climate change is bad. They rarely take effective action.
Calling into question the sincerity of people concerned about climate change but also concerned about actually getting to work on time and not stinking and getting fired because their bosses don't care is just some nasty, uncharitable stuff. And it's also counterproductive. It's the "but Al Gore flies in jets!" thing all over again, discrediting what state actors need to be doing because of the actions of private citizens. Don't do that. It's bad for you and bad for us.
https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/fast-facts-transportation-...
Not all of that is personal transportation, but a lot of it is. This is not a blip on the graph.
I also agree that large polluters need to change, and that we need state action. I was just pointing out that people who seem to believe climate change is a problem rarely make major lifestyle changes consistent with their stated beliefs.
Saying this is primarily a collective action problem is passing the buck. It's a convenient excuse for doing nothing. Collective action is much harder than personal action. Ultimately, we need both collective and personal action.
> Calling into question the sincerity of people concerned about climate change but also concerned about actually getting to work on time and not stinking and getting fired because their bosses don't care is just some nasty, uncharitable stuff.
You seem to believe that cycling to work is much more challenging than it actually is. You may be surprised, but no cyclist I know has the problems you've mentioned. Those problems can happen, but they are not that common in my experience.
Yes, the US is a car dependent society, but you can choose where to live and choose your job. Like most people choose where to live based on their driving commute, I choose where to live based on my cycling commute. It is not a long commute, and I arrive on time and usually am not sweaty.
Also, cycling was just an example. It doesn't need to be cycling. Work at home, switch from your gas guzzler, etc.
But it seems to me that the marginal cost in terms of CO2 emissions is not exactly clear for flying. Whether I fly or not, the planes will fly. My addition to a single plane in terms of the weight is not that significant. It becomes a more murky economic argument. I agree people should not fly, but this is more of a collective action type approach in my view. It takes roughly a plane load of people to make a difference.
In contrast, a driver has much more direct control over the CO2 emissions. The marginal addition of CO2 is much clearer.
Or to frame it another way, when you fly you're playing Russian roulette with adding an amount of CO2 to the atmosphere dwarfing anything else you might be causing.
Further the first 50% reduction is the lowest hanging fruit. We don't need to get to 100% to make a huge difference over time.
Even a single industrial polluter is nothing. All the cars on the road are worse than the worst single industrial plant.
Shutting down coal power would achieve all climate goals for several decades and we can in fact just kind of do that in most places. Government subsidies are what's keeping coal power plants online in many locations. The problem is that this would impose costs on business owners, or force banks and/or governments to pay out large sums to those business owners (not that large though: tens to hundreds of millions per plant). In other words : governments worldwide would have to scale back what they're doing for a short while to instantly destroy their climate goals.
In other words: government, elected CHOICES are what's keeping the biggest co2 producers online. Governments absolute unwillingness, in Australia's case, to pay out relatively small sums they agreed to pay decades ago, and of course not getting a budget increase out of it.
Laws that are proposed, almost without fail, go after individual, totally insignificant co2 producers, and impose large costs on individuals for marginal, or even net negative gain (e.g. well known example: for the longest time, and maybe even now, solar panels were net-negative, and certainly, in the short term that's still true. Certainly in the short term switching to solar power increases CO2 emissions, it doesn't reduce them. It may become a net positive after 10 years of constantly using the panels, under idealized conditions).
Suggested changes to individual lives, like forgoing cars entirely, impose yet larger costs but thankfully for now governments are mostly unwilling to do this.
At what point do we get to conclude that the intent of climate action parties is simply to exert power over individuals, to capture government, regardless of all costs to the climate ? That these parties not only don't care about climate change, but are actually willing to sacrifice the climate, just to gain power ?
Besides: I think it's extremely telling that nobody is willing to consider geoengineering (artificially lowering out planet's albedo). We know methods to do that, and of course all governments promptly decided that was off-limits (with, get this, "what if we're wrong" arguments. Look: either climate prediction works, or it doesn't. Denying geoengineering solutions is little better than outright denying climate change entirely).
Let's NOT USE THOSE ! They're scary ! Science is wrong and evil ! Green glowy children !
And of course, somehow you can criticize science like nuclear and it's safety record, but shout "science denial" at people opposing climate science. That's an entirely reasonable attitude of course.
But it's very clear: getting and grabbing power, that's what it's about. Not fixing a problem.
I do get frustrated with some enviro groups though, currently the ones who want to replace nuclear plants with natural gas plants.
I agree.
Cars break a feedback loop between how far you travel and how tired you are. Bikes merely modify this feedback loop. As long as the feedback loop exists, energy use is constrained regardless of price. But this is also what makes cars so addictive.
Car dependency seems to have peaked in the US, so I am hoping to see a reduction in the future. Removing parking requirements would be a good start.
Good luck with that ;-)
If you have high child mortality, limited access to contraception, and few employment opportunities for women, they have a lot of children. You change that, and they choose to have fewer. It happened in Europe. It happened in North America. It happened in South America. It happened in Asia (with some draconian policies to help it along). It's starting to happen in Africa: [0] (Check the map tab to see country-by-country over time).
We can do this without draconian policies. All we have to do is work to end global poverty. People think is hopeless, but twenty-five years ago, those same people would have said there's no way we'd cut it in half by now, and we did[1].
(Obligatory plug for the Against Malaria Foundation[2], which is my charity of choice for fighting global poverty, and at the same time, climate change.)
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality
[2] https://www.againstmalaria.com/ https://www.thelifeyoucansave.org/where-to-donate/against-ma...
Unbelievable.
It seems clear to me that if there were only 5 million people in the world then human caused climate change wouldn't be an issue. Isn't that obvious? I'm not advocating that we get to that level. I'm just pointing out that there exists a number for the population such that human caused climate change would no longer be an issue. I don't think it's disputable that this is so.
I'm not advocating mass killings or anything like that. Just pointing out an obvious thing. If where were way less people then pollution, etc. would not be an issue.
We need to solve for different variables: energy source (we need more nuclear), transportation (we need people to utilize public transportation and drive less cars), and we'd need to work on carbon capture (which is a technological problem).
Solving all these requires policy shift and government enforcement.
That's my problem with the entire political side of climate and environmentalism. The simple fact that Al Gore flies in a Learjet while simultaneously claiming the "Earth has a fever." Makes it impossible for me to take that movement seriously. Even if he buys "carbon credits" -- that carbon he's generating is still being generated. You can't dump mercury in a river and then pay a bunch of money and pretend mercury wasn't dumped in a river.
The Paris Climate talks -- Anyone have a look at the tarmac at Le Bourget? Delegations of essentially anonymous officials arriving via private jets and being shuttled around by private cars while suggesting that I should make my house hotter by turning up the air conditioner temperature or I should pay more to take my kids to school each morning. And they're flying private? They're actually having an in-person meeting at all? If the threat were so dire, then why not video conference? Or at the very least fly commercial and take public transit.
Even Bill and Hilary have flown commercial -- so arguments about the feasibility of that aren't very valid. Certainly random environmental officials where nobody even knows their names, let alone faces aren't subject to any special security requirements that would necessitate private jets. They do it because they see themselves as more important than those that they would regulate. It's Animal Farm where some animals are more equal than others.
To be clear, I'm not debating any particular scientific position -- I'm just suggesting that many people (like me) have a hard time reconciling how "dire" our situation is when the supposed "experts" aren't making any changes to their own lifestyle unless it's politically expedient. Personally, I try to live a low-impact lifestyle when possible. I don't waste water, I use programmable thermostats, I reuse when possible and I don't drive if it's easy to take public transit or company shuttles. However, my adherence to a reasonably green lifestyle is offset 1000 fold when some factory in China dumps benzene in the water or some Delhi trucker fills the air with dense smoke while idling in traffic for hours.
It might seem to an skeptical observer that the anti-carbon political movement might be more about controlling/profiting from/reallocating the means of production more than helping the actual environment. The implication that people on the far left care more about the environment seems to be good marketing -- people on the far left seem to care more about far left economics than the environment -- the environment is just good populist toast upon which to serve a marmalade of collectivist economic policy.
It seems that most normal people, right and left, care about the environment. For me though (on the libertarian side of the aisle,) when I hear stuff like this, from former United Nations climate official Ottmar Edenhofer:
"One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with the environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole," said Edenhofer, who co-chaired the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change working group on Mitigation of Climate Change from 2008 to 2015.
When I hear stuff like that, then that discredits a lot of the climate alarmism in my mind -- despite the fact that I actually do care deeply about the environment.
The point of carbon credits is offsetting. For example, suppose I plant a bunch of trees to earn carbon credits. I then sell Al Gore my carbon credits. Thus, Al Gore is able to fly about in his jet, I am able to make money planting trees, and in the end no net carbon has been added to the atmosphere.
However, we already lost it - in a very real sense - because we failed to convince enough humans that it's important, that they ought to demand tougher legislation, policies, treaties, mandates, cleaner air, better waste management, more energy efficiency, instant order of nuclear and renewable plants to phase out CO2 producing energy sources as soon as possible, etc.
We should be building 20km long hydro T-s, electrifying more and more railways, capturing as much emission as we can (chemical plants, big freighter ships, etc.)
Instead we are building walls on borders, blabbering about secession, killing/jailing/maiming/kidnapping/torturing each other in an organized fashion all around the planet.
We're simply late to efficiently manage a lot of things.
But humanity is very likely to survive, so in that sense as long as someone can ask that question we don't have to use past tense.
ELI5: if the temperature of a wet thermometer(which would normally be colder due to evaporation) in a given place goes over around 31C this area becomes uninhabitable for almost all mammals.
Burning all the known fossil fuels would be enough to make it so for some places on earth, but the big unknown is what about the other sources of GHG's like thawing permafrost or clathrates lying under the sea?
Fortunately planet Earth won't be bothered by us too much. The cycles of ice ages we are in will "correct" most anything we do. The loss of biodiversity will probably be our only legacy.
I agree that wording is important. Talking about climate changes is important. We need an effort, perhaps greater than the war effort in world war 2 to make the changes necessary because whether we do nothing or make needed changes for the better, change is coming. There is no turning point. The Great Turning is a shift from the Industrial Growth Society to a life-sustaining civilization.
However, I will say this. If anyone has ever been in a large storm, or a drought, you'll be shockingly aware at how quickly a small announcement about "sold-out water" or "store stock issues" turns into absolute, utter, pure, _pandemonium_. Once _that_ happens often enough, I think people will begin to admit that we lost _something_, for sure.
To answer your question though, it's generally believed that it will be a gradually-growing sense of despair and dread, and a growing struggle. Migration into the northern hemisphere as it slowly becomes the last livable place on Earth. Ever played musical chairs in the later stages of the game? Yeah.
Honestly, it's remarkably similar to the mechanics behind the French Revolution, but instead of just rich vs poor, it's some kind of crazy triadic chaos-war between rich, poor, and nature, all made more ironic that nukes have a triadic motif.
Go beyond that and everyone dies.
Perhaps our descendants will be farming Antarctica.
So it's on a rolling scale up to 31C. At or past, yeah its a binary cliff.