Scientists warned about climate change in 1965

I wonder how big is the impact of residual antibiotics in meat and dairy on bacterial resistance.

I think we tried doing that. See, for example, Carl Sagan testifying before Congress in 1985 [1].

I _wish_ that fossil fuels could be on your list. I think a main reason why nothing is being done is that oil is big business! Oil companies have toppled a democratically elected government because that government was cutting into their oil profits [2]. Moving away from fossil fuels would cut into oil's bottom line, so they paid lots of money to discredit and oppose climate change research for decades [3].

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wp-WiNXH6hI [2]: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/bp-and-iran-the-forgotten-histo... [3]: https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-53640382

Ignoring the scientific realities, the public is hopelessly lost and emotional on the subject.

It’s frustrating to say the least but this is the effect of mass programming. The question to me is why are these people being programmed to think that everything is hopeless?

It’s not a helpful strategy for actually making changes that can help the climate

Obviously, it's not anywhere close to enough and the effects won't be significant until the first derivative goes negative too, but anybody telling you we're doing nothing is selling you panic rather than solutions.

So we didn't really do much about it from the homeowner's perspective.

P.S.: You hurt your credibility by using a straw man of Malthus.

That’s higher than the actual warning of the global troposphere observed over the most recent forty years.

But, maybe his “generation” is more than twenty years.

We don’t talk about climate change as an engineering project, but it absolutely could be.

Think if we spent a fraction of what we spend on war every decade and instead dedicated that to tech to cleanse the atmosphere or oceans, or maybe even fusion.

That kind of increase is making frequent enough 1 in a century extreme weather events, Canada got 2 years ago nearly 50°C in a town, floods in all continents, increased frequency and strength of hurricanes and so on.

And to make it worse, it is not the end of the change, and enough of the current warming is fueled by the warming itself, due to positive feedback loops, so it will keep going on even if we stop emissions. Things will keep getting worse, and will keep worsening probably for centuries. And things will stop being, let’s say, pleasant, closer to today than to the end of that process.

Prioritizing efficient public transportation and the cargo train network. Reducing meat production. Insulating houses. Etc, would have prevented many net-bad investments that were made and would've alleviated the need to now very rapidly transition the economy at enormous cost.

Not to speak of the cost in the future if we don't fix this.

Solar and wind have lower EROEI than fossil fuels.

The cost of extraction and use of fossil fuels is much lower than the real cost of using them. A carbon tax system can fix some of that and let the market do it's thing properly with more complete information.

But it's ok because it makes gasoline cheap, and hey, we can figure out how to clean^H^H^H^H^H make more money on the cleanup when people start dying.

Now we have upset this stability and will have to spend a large part of our economic output just to defend our current standard of living. The less we do about climate change, the worse we'll have it.

The planet will be fine and humanity won't disappear, but we lose a lot of opportunities every year we sit on our asses.

Same can't be said about global scale we use fossil fuels.

People took it wildly out of context, think day of tomorrow’s ice hurricanes vs the extremely mildly by comparison effect changing ocean circulation was actually predicted to have.

We they right, or was the majority of scientists who felt that even with our increased particulates it would not be enough to counter the increasing greenhouse gases right?

We never got to find out, because the particulate emissions are noticeable enough to the average person and annoying enough to the average person that bipartisan efforts to reduce those emissions can get political support, such as the Clean Air Act of 1970 in the US.

This led to a massive reduction in particulate emissions.

I don't think that's what people were predicting.

If I'm understanding your argument correctly, it's that people have been worrying/predicting issues with the climate for a while, but everything is currently fine?

If that's a correct understanding (and apologies if it's not), then here's my argument:

If someone told you that "50 years from now, there's going to be an earthquake in this exact spot; here's the data to back me up," it'd be kind of silly to say 25 years later "there's no earthquake. I don't see what all the fuss was about."

That information was showing up on TV paid by big oil to confuse the population, it worked.

Change, apropos of nothing, is not positive or negative; but when the climate changes so much that the ocean turns into acid and the animals start to die off, people will have concerns.

And it’s just potentially gonna change life as we know it. For example, the currents in the oceans are changing. This could potentially eradicate a large number of maritime species pretty fast. Which in turn are food not available anymore to other species. And so on.

More severe storms, droughts/desertification, ocean levels rising, oceans acidifying, ocean currents potentially hauting, lower crop yields, loss of arable land, fights over remaining land that is livable, mass migrations, mass extinctions.

Basically, the world we evolved to live in is changing such that most of life isn't going to be capable of living in the new world. So mass extinctions will occur (and have already started) and the next wave of life suited for this new climate will emerge and take over (hint: this won't be humans).

[0] https://xkcd.com/1732/

Or, if we somehow set the greenhouse gas levels back to where it was not long ago and kept it there, we would Not have tremendous excess amounts of drought, famine, flooding, wars and refugees.

Yes earth has been hot and cold, but the point is to avoid enormous fluctuations due to variance as they lead to extreme events. We saw huge droughts and floods in Europe, China, and the US, events that we hadn’t seen in a long time.

We also know that the variance causes a split of the polar vortex in Europe which creates heat domes and traps air from Northern Africa. The world we have built was not designed to withstand such heat, see infrastructure melting in England last summer, and much of the world is not prepared to deal with extreme heat, ask the Scandinavians how they handled last couple of summers, I know I suffered in CPH.

We also know that it is caused by our emissions, while we use “CO2” it’s a few different gases and we scale their potency to equivalent CO2.

I can recommend “firmament” as an introduction to weather science. Dr Simon Clark is an excellent science communicator with a PhD in meteorology, and has a great YT channel.

https://xkcd.com/1732/

But since you've premeptively dismissed the science behind it, maybe a web comic won't convince you either.

Anyway, I can see the point that something equally or more disruptive will happen, so, whatever. As others have pointed out, we're all indirectly very bought in to the current equilibrium, even more so those in power. There's always resistance to change, and so I'd say it's that that people are against, rather than the end state. (And of course it's been turned into a big political power grab, so it's in everyone's interests for you to belive either it's the worst threat we face or it's not happening at all and we can ignore it).

    Rapidly increasing likelihood of exceeding 50 °C in parts of the Mediterranean and the Middle East due to human influence

I think "Climate Change" as a term doesn't really strike at the heart of the issue. The issue is not that 'any change is bad,' but rather that the climate is changing (1) in a way that will negatively impact people, and (2) because of _our_ greenhouse gas emissions.

There are many negative impacts, but here's one major one: farmers grow certain foods because their farms experience certain climates. If your farm gets too hot, or too little rain, or too much rain, then your crops won't grow. The world bank has a report analyzing this particular issue in depth: https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/6766014682496426...

If you're interested, there are many more reports, from different sources, analyzing the varied effects that climate change will have on humanity.

Our current societal organization requires the climate to be within certain bounds, our current way of living, and the things we rely on to survive (plants, livestock) only work within certain temperature ranges with a certain stability/predicability.

adding Greenhouse gasses to atmophere -> traps more heat -> increases volatility of the system

Which causes more intense heatwaves, more intense colds, quicker changes in weather patterns, rare weather events becoming more common.

Which in turn ruins harvests, increase scarcity, creates migration waves, creates conflicts and societal instability which affects everything because of how interconnected our way of living is.

The poorest people are the first ones affected because it requires money to mitigate the effects, so you might say, so what because you yourself are in a rich place, but your rich economy requires on products produced in cheaper places.

There probably is a point where it becomes prohibitively expensive to continue our way of living, because the cheaper places stop working, so it's a good idea for rich countries to take expensive measures now to prevent everything falling apart in the future.

And personally I feel like it's also our moral obligation because the richest countries are responsible for a large amount of excess greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere.

Think of the weather system as a huge engine. We are effectively stepping on the accelerator with an enormous number of terawatts. That's a lot of wind and rain.