It's baffling that here we are in the full motions of global warming, and we can find all manner of distractions to take our mind off it, and divert attention. Yes, there is a movement to halt global warming or slow it down, but it needs more traction. The topic needs to be the frontpage of every newspaper. The world is burning before our eyes.
How much could also be other human factors, like building up levees and flood control systems that aren't up to snuff and/or shift worse flooding problems downstream (this has been the case in many parts of the US for decades now; can we presume Europe is better in flood control management than the Army Corps and thousands of small river towns?).
I'd be all for attributing it to not sweeping forests well enough if that actually got the funding to start seriously combating the issue, it’s a positive feedback loop that needs to be mitigated
The cause for the failures have been unprecedented rainfall. There are a million possible factors that can influence the situation, climate change is the leading one. Let's fix it instead of discussing if climate change represents a 90% of the problem or just a 78%.
Let's also spend trillions adding more safety for a worsening and more hostile climate. We could have saved that by taking action earlier, now we need to pay to keep ourselves safe. Let's act before it costs more money and more lives.
Germany has had "once in century" floods every decade for a while now. It's a densely populated country, meaning people can't just move somewhere else and there are not large swaths of unpopulated/unused lands that could be repurposed for massive flood control systems.
It's also not like we are talking about towns that have been built recently in risk-areas, we are talking about towns that have been in those places for centuries, sometimes over a millennia, which is a testament to how out of the ordinary these floods are.
Secondly, after crazy disasterous, world-headlines fires three years ago, Calif. Governor Gavin "perfect hairgel" Newsom appointed a blue-ribbon committee on tracking and dealing with these fires from a forestry point of view.. that committee publishes online and in fact as a Github repo. That committee has to work with aggressive, self-serving entities well entrenched in govt money and commercial licenses, which benefit from "us-vs-them" language and tactics.
In this writers opinion, these are truly historic events, not in the good way.
Trying to jump into these huge, world-scale theories comes with the risk of blinding us to alternative explanations that might be more valid.
That is a beautiful analogy.
What kills me is An Inconvenient Truth came out in 2006 and we've chosen to ignore the issue until it radically changes the planet.
Why would you trust a politician on science when he has a political agenda (allegedly) and isn't a scientist to begin with?
If it had been made by the head of NASA or similar, that might have done better. Even if that doesn't mean people would believe it more, it's just the principle of the thing. It made the issue come out the gate as more partisan than it had to be.
I'm saying it was a bad choice in principle. If I was funding a movie about climate change or trying to convince the world... I'd get some PhDs and scientists of notable standing. A politician is the last, worst choice I would have done.
If I had to make a movie about Climate Change, out of principle, I wouldn't choose a politician and I would choose someone with a scientific degree. That's what I'm saying.
That movie happened, and the public is aware of it, largely due to the fact that Al Gore — whether you hate his politics or not — was in a position where he was exposed to the science, cared deeply about the issue, and dedicated himself to getting the message out. Public messaging being kind of a big part of being a politician.
There's also the issue that some countries (the US) are a lot more concerned about it than other countries (not naming names). Those other countries have every incentive to watch us flail around making the lives of our citizens harder (through taxation, meat reduction, other proposals) trying to cut emissions while they sit back and egg us on, and maybe pay lip service once in a while with the occasional inconsequential project.
I don't know where that person got their idea from but it's clearly a very bad source.
The scary thing with theories is that reality doesn't change whether your theory is considered proven or not. We might have no evidence that "global dimming" would be a thing, but then it absolutely could happen. Or, admittedly, vice versa, where we thought it could happen but it doesn't. We need more research as usual...
This is just denialism of prediction as a concept. A universal excuse to not do anything. After all, why work to extinguish the fire when it could go out all by itself?
We're playing with the world here. If scientists mess up and their reaction to climate change causes other problems, nobody will listen to a scientist ever again on this issue, and that comes with its own risks.
Concerned ? Maybe, doing something about it, not so sure
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...
IIRC a significant drop did occur over the past year or so due to covid.
> This fire is going to continue to grow -- the extremely dry vegetation and weather are not in our favor," said Joe Hessel, an incident commander for the Oregon Department of Forestry.
So clearly they acknowledge that the weather is a factor, and that seems pretty related to climate change.
Why does it have to be an either/or thing? If a fire magnitude becomes newsworthy because several factors aligned to make it that way, it seems silly to point fingers at scapegoats as an excuse for continuing to do nothing on any front.
Oh sure, but climate change deniers also like to say temperature changes have existed since the dawn of time (while conveniently ignoring magnitude[0]).
The thing is forest management people have been warning about increasing risks of large fires for years and fires have been consistently getting bigger and worse (just off the top of my head, there was big basin last year, lytton, yakutia, dozens of others, and now this). There's literally hundreds of peer reviewed studies showing correlation between our polluting ways and ice cap melting and correlation between that and extreme weather events.
Besides, climate change is a symptom of a larger problem. Depletion of water sources for example is also related to dryness and is also a byproduct of human activities. I think it's shortsighted to say "onoes climate change, throw carbon offsets at it, problem solved!" just as it is to say "onoes forest fires, do better forest management, problem solved!"
Solving eco problems is going to require a lot more than cherrypicking and addressing only darling themes. Ignoring whichever factor you don't understand the underlying data for is pretty much the same as inaction where there should be action.
And honestly it's not even fully correct to say "climate change is not the spark" - having stronger storms with more lightning results in more chances for ignition as well. But afaik most fires are attributable to human causes - the problem is that climate change is making the fires much larger and more destructive than they otherwise would be.