291–300 of 523 posts
For a balanced view, this is a must read from Professor of Meteorology Richard S. Lindzen at MIT: https://www.thegwpf.org/content/uploads/2018/10/Lindzen-2018...
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No that's not what I propose and I also don't think that's what op proposed. If you read the comments again you will see that all that was said is "you won't change the outcome this way", which means that political action alone is not enough. Look at what's happening currently. All that fear and doom may lead to political decisions, but have they changed the carbon level in our atmosphere? You try to regulate somethi…
> If you want to do something, it's much better to do something positive, e.g. passing subsidies for renewable energy tech. Okay, that makes sense and, even better, also works sometimes. In fact, renwable energy is a good example where incentives can trigger changes (see the solar market in Europe). However, there are also many examples where incentives have not worked, although running for decades, because people ar…
I don't get why it's necessary to start a left vs. right, regulations vs. non-regulations war on this. This is effectively destroying the discussion about real solutions.
I got a completely different impression of op's comment. Namely, that we as humans cannot control everything, but there's ways we can get real progress when we combine our talents to come up with great technical solutions.
I doubt that we will be able to turn the clock back, and I wouldn't want to participate in trying.
That doesn't mean that we cannot do something positive via political means meanwhile. I'm just saying that evidence suggests it doesn't solve the problem on a global scale and hence is obviously not the whole solution.
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In democracies we can't all just throw up our hands and blame it on the political class and big business. If the ordinary people of the developed world really wanted something done about it, as a higher priority than anything else, there is no gun held to their heads preventing them from voting for that. We are all benefiting hugely from the cheap energy reaped from fossil fuels, whether we like it or not, and in the…
Indeed, there's no gun to our heads preventing us voting for taking serious action on climate change. There doesn't need to be. Imagine I'm a voter in, say, the US or the UK. There is no major party I can vote for that will, if elected, take serious action on climate change. In both nations there is a Green Party which probably would, but it has a firmly established track record of getting approximately zero votes; t…
An excellent example is Brexit. The Brexit referendum existed solely because of UKIP and UKIP have only ever won 2 parliamentary seats. And those were both for sitting MPs that had defected.
However, UKIP did get 4-odd million votes, plenty of local councillors, MEPs etc. In other words, they clearly had a lot of support for their flagship policies and that caused the main parties, that had UKIP voters in their constituencies, to take notice. Unfortunately.
This has also, to a lesser extent, been the case with green issues. The Greens increased their vote from the 80's onwards and the main parties started to adopt green policies accordingly.
So, in the UK at least, there are well worn paths to get policies, like climate change action, to the top of the heap.
I'd argue that there are a few reasons why they're not top of the heap today:
1) Other things are deemed more important. Clearly Brexit is one. Whether you agree that it should be more important, or not, it's fairly undeniable that it's true.
2) The folk that have expressed most interest in green issues have tended to not be very engaged in formal politics. 3) There's a strong argument that UKIP's popularity was, in large part, due to Nigel Farage. He may well be a cock but he's a cock that was on TV a lot reinforcing his message. I mean, I like Sian Berry (no idea who the other bloke is) but she's no Nigel Farage.
There's no climate catastrophe. Nothing have to be done about preventing imaginable things.
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> The Earth has also been a lot warmer than it is now Key here is rate of change, and what humans can survive. We are changing the climate many many times faster than ever before. Nature does not have the time to adapt. And the wars, famines and mass displacements coming from ecosystem collapse is like nothing we've seen in human history. Think we have a problem with a few million migrants? Try a billion or two! P-T…
Earth will be fine. Life on Earth will be fine, but that life will be different to the life we have today. The only thing not fine is whether humans survive what they/we ultimately have brought about. But in there is a kind of beautiful justice that the universe has in it's self-correcting algorithm... if you create imbalance, the imbalance will correct in time but perhaps to do so it kills you. If we care about the…
Have to agree with you there. Things will probably get much worse before they get better. Now there are 2 possible attitudes, either depression from obvious lack of adequate action, or acceptance of what's about to come will come, whatever it is.
By acceptance I don't mean ignorance, by all means promote moral, 'green' solutions, recycle, vote for sane people who at least pretend to care (I am looking at you, US). Or do gazillion of other things that help, and avoid those which don't. I know I do my part, however insignificant.
But change is inevitable. Even though on paper we can still avoid most dark stuff, we won't. Mankind as a whole will react properly only when it really will start to hurt, globally, and rich won't be able to comfortably escape or hide from it.
Some will die because of this. Some will profit from it. On enough long-term scale, it won't matter unless mankind will go extinct which I don't believe will happen.
Do I like it? Not at all. Can I change it? Same answer. Am I content with it and not waste my time, energy and mood on being depressed about it? Absolutely.
They make the case nuclear is the best solution for environmentalists (the guys who made it were hard core activists) and that things like solar are toxic and leaching heavy metals.
They say Nuclear is the safest and cleanest solution and is the only viable solution if we want to solve climate change.
For a balanced view, this is a must read from Professor of Meteorology Richard S. Lindzen at MIT: https://www.thegwpf.org/content/uploads/2018/10/Lindzen-2018...
That's not balanced. The overwhelming majority of experts in the field disagree with Lindzen, who is largely famous among laypeople because he is one of the few academics that deniers can point to.