51–60 of 124 posts
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Education would be a good start. Guess who can decide about what we are taught? Governments.
People know their personal largest impact is cars and meat. But personal convenience has always beaten doing the right thing.
Very few people have the luxury of considering anything outside their immediate circle of concern.
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People know their personal largest impact is cars and meat. But personal convenience has always beaten doing the right thing.
The vast majority of people I know (Texas) couldn't live a productive life without a car. Some people certainly could but not most. Meat, though, they could definitely do without—and for most of them it'd be healthier.
I have been hearing this since the mid 1980s. I wouldn't have heard of it before, because before then scientists were telling us that the climate was going to get a lot cooler...
That's massively misleading.
The scientists that predicted that predicted it because they forecast that the cooling effect from particulate pollution such as smog would be bigger than the warming affect from greenhouse gases.
Not long after, we actually made fairly strong clean air laws and greatly cut back the particulate emissions, thus changing the assumptions that the cooling predictions were based on. The scientists that had predicted cooling, which had only been a small minority, then agreed with the rest that we'd have warming (assuming we didn't also get the greenhouse gases dealt with).
I have been hearing this since the mid 1980s. I wouldn't have heard of it before, because before then scientists were telling us that the climate was going to get a lot cooler...
The science underpining the theory of global warming on the other hand is far, far more robust. I don't feel the need to recount how robust it is but I'll just note that it has withstood "red teams" funded by the Koch brothers, as well as Exxon and the other major oil companies who now all accept the science behind global warming.
It is highly disingenuous to equate it with global cooling.
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https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/indicators/global-an... > According to different observational records of global average annual near-surface (land and ocean) temperature, the last decade (2008–2017) was 0.89 °C to 0.93 °C warmer than the pre-industrial average, which makes it the warmest decade on record. Of the 17 warmest years on record, 16 have occurred since 2000. The year 2017 was one of the world’s thre…
But 100-200 years is very little time for comparison isn't it? Is there any presumed data on what it was before that?
You also say you think the last decade seemed colder, the reply you got was that 16 of the 17 hottest years since recording began were after 2000. But you ignore that part of the reply.
You are working for the forces that want to stop our mitigation of the problem, you are the enemy.
I have been hearing this since the mid 1980s. I wouldn't have heard of it before, because before then scientists were telling us that the climate was going to get a lot cooler...
However it then turned out that global warming due to CO2 was happing way faster and way more than any potential cooling. The scientists weren't wrong: the cooling effect is still there. Its just completely swamped by all the things we are doing to the atmosphere.
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This is absolutely not true. People don't know that. Ask 2000 people on the street in a southern red state what their contribution to climate change is. I bet you get 0s back. "Taht fake thing isn't real" - "My car doesn't pollute you schmuck" - "the Earth is here for us to pollute it, that's what god said", etc. People do not know that their largest personal impact is cars and meat. They just don't know that at all…
Go to a highly educated Silicon Valley tech company. Survey around. How many of these people eat beef? How many take frequent vacations via plane? Per capita, especially due to the plane travel, their emissions are probably as high as someone in a southern red state. Personal convenience beats doing the right ting.
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You as a concerned citizen can do plenty on your own. Most people could cut down their emissions and other environmental impacts by 50% easily if they really cared. The problem is that most people don't really care that much when push comes to shove, and in aggregate this is the reason for why we're moving so slowly on climate change.
There are limits to what individuals can do. Take automobile fuel efficiency. Cars these days are way more efficient and cleaner than they were fifty years ago, and they perform far better. Consumer choice would never have made this happen in response to market forces. You couldn't buy an efficient, high-performance car in the late 60s even if you wanted to. Companies needed an incentive to invest for the long-long t…
Now, why do they drive so much and drive such inefficient cars? It's largely because fuel is so much cheaper in the US than in the EU.
What I was trying to get at in my original comment is not that we should all solve climate change by personal action, and that public policy shouldn't be involved. I wish I could pay more taxes so the country I'm living in would migrate to renewables faster.
Rather, it's that if you look at how concerned people are politically about climate change, and then look at their revealed preferences, both when it comes to what they do personally and what they'd really stand for politically, it turns out that in the aggregate they don't take the problem seriously.
How many people who say "we must do something" in the US would say put up with a 100% increase in fuel taxes (bringing it in more in line with the EU)? I bet you'd go from 50% approval to 5% approval pretty fast.
1. http://internationalcomparisons.org/environment/transportati...
2. http://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/fact-sheet...
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Lol, looks like the Google result of "convert 4C to Fahrenheit". In the authors defence, it isn't their fault the Americans still use Fahrenheit.
Wasn't 100 Fahrenheit the temperature of a chicken on tuesday in the sunshine? Can't quite remember how that scale was created.