Kinda bummed that you weren't joking. The tone of these threads is pretty depressing and I could have used a little pick-me-up.
Anyway, I'm not a climatologist, but from what I understand we will be seeing significant global ramifications in the next 2-3 decades. In other words, it's not just the next generation that's going to suffer, it's going to be a great deal many of us who are alive today.
Not OP but if you're posting here on HN, you're probably not going to find too much trouble parsing the actual academic papers vs. press releases and IPCC summaries
When you do, you may find that while there's virtually no question human activities are having effect(s) on climate (very likely negative) there's a LOT of uncertainty on what and how much the effect(s) are.
Did you though the same when we were told that in 20 year the Earth would be unhabitable due to the holes in the ozone layer and that it would take hundreds of not thousands of years to heal (that was 25 years ago btw)?
How about when Al Gore told your that inconvenient truth that the sea levels world rise 100m during the next decade (that was 15 years ago btw)?
Funny you mention that. No one needed to panic, 1980s politicians appeared to remember what some of their job was. Two rather right leaning free-market monetarist politicians - Thatcher and Reagan - championed international action to phase out freon and other CFCs. Very successfully. The ozone hole closed.
At the exact same time Thatcher was making speeches - to the UN and many others about the need for strong international action on climate. That was less successful. Had anyone bothered to listen we might have sorted emissions by now. Here's one snippet from her 1989 UN speech[1]:
"We should work through this great organisation and its agencies to secure world-wide agreements on ways to cope with the effects of climate change, the thinning of the Ozone Layer, and the loss of precious species.
We need a realistic programme of action and an equally realistic timetable.
Each country has to contribute, and those countries who are industrialised must contribute more to help those who are not."
How prescient.
> sea levels world rise 100m during the next decade
I wish more of the comments here were like this. Most of my comments are rubbish troll-bait, I'm glad people like NeedMoreTea exist. Someone who can calmly and rationally make a series of excellent points grounded in fact and history :)
The thing is, those Thatcher speeches (and of course all the movement in Europe) worked, we reduced our emissions by almost 30% in 30 years. Which makes it specially bad when a bunch of people from the comfort of their life in here, now decide they can go around with their extremist views of environmentalism causing havoc in no less than in an European country: i.e. the only set of industrialized countries that actually addressed the problem.
Sure Europe took more action than most, but those actions are clearly now seen to be a) insufficient, and b) limited to a small proportion of the world's emissions. China and the US more than cancel out any improvements the EU made. They might have been sufficient if everyone had played, though I doubt it. They didn't, so the goal posts have moved significantly. There's still only one planet.
Apologies for my shorthand purely for brevity, I thought the real progress was quite well known. The ozone hole is not actually closed yet. The trend is very much in the right direction thanks to those international treaties on CFCs. There's also huge hysteresis in the system so change follows very slowly indeed. The trend of improvement has indeed slowed, apparently courtesy of China breaching the treaty they signed - they have form here, not just the recent breach of Hong Kong treaties. Sadly the UN and international community doesn't seem willing to sanction China for breaches of anything much.
At current progress - depending on China - a century or a little over looks to be right on the money. The clock is at about 50 years. Nonetheless it looks like we found the right cause and remedy, and acted in appropriate time.
Less exaggerated catastrophe, more bloody accurate estimate I'd say. As your BBC link confirms. Here's a link with some trend graphs - see for yourself.
Where's the exaggeration? The odd piece reporting badly doesn't make the case - the media is often terrible reporting science. Any science. :)
Sorry but those actions where clearly sufficient. If all countries had reduced their CO2 emissions like the EU block did, we would be in an excellent state. The reduction needs to keep happening in a steady pace, not have a sudden shift like these extremist environmentalist are calling for.
My issue with those analysis is that they are political, not environmentalist. For instance, if you look at India in those same analysis, you see they are doing great (although having increased they CO2 emissions in 300% and set to soon become the 2nd biggest polluter by a long margin).
In fact that's my issue with this all movement: It seems to take roots in contesting Western Society by using the climate crisis to force major political change in the West by disrupting the all economic output (because this will be what happens if you suddenly break the energy consumption by several %), and then build a society according to the political views of a minority that thinks they know best.
At the same time, that won't stop global warming at all, since the emissions on the West are already the minor part of the global emissions (due to china) and soon will become an even smaller part (due to India).
No, they weren't. They were meant to be a first step of many as part of a sustained programme of international action. We mostly didn't bother, so it's rather academic anyway. We lost the luxury of 30 years of steady incremental managed and subsidised change and now need to apply the emergency brake.
I'm not sure which environmental extremists you are thinking of. Environmental extremists like the UN IPCC - the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, whose current chair is an economist - are contesting Western society by disrupting all economic output? There was me thinking they are working to try and keep the possibility of some economic output by avoiding civilisation crash.
This is not some cliche hair-shirt 70s environmental hippies going overboard on the ganja at peace camp. This is chemists, meteorologists, climatologists and economists, etc appointed by the world's governments. Governments that are, I assume, mostly not seeking a rerun of 1917.
XR want to achieve the IPCC's aims. Nothing more. I see regular people from a diverse mix of very normal backgrounds with regular jobs. I see no reds under the bed.
The EU reduced their emissions by close to 30% in 30 years. These actions were obviously sufficient. Problem is that only the EU (what what are now the EU members) took the effort. The EU should be praised as an example and instead we have a bunch of environmentalist extremists shutting down airports here with drones.
You made a similar point about China in one of the other siblings. But now you've expanded it to the point where you're contradicting yourself.
On the one hand, you're saying that trying to tackle climate change in the UK is pointless because China is contributing the lion's share of CO2. But then on the other hand you're equating the climate change crisis to crises that have come before and were proven to be exaggerated scenarios.
It might be worth you stating where you stand on climate change, otherwise I'm not really sure what points you're actually trying to make.
1. Yep, I somewhat agree. So can you please clarify your stance as to whether the current climate change situation is another example?
2. Yep, and I sincerely hope China also pulls their heads out of their collective asses. However, the UK is also not out of the woods yet [1]. Just because China has a long way to go doesn't mean any other country should be easing off the gas pedal (terrible pun, hope you'll forgive me).
My stance on the current global warming is that it is real and that it is serious, but not nearly as catastrophic as the media and these more extremist environmentalists, present it.
i.e. If all other countries would go on a steady course of diminishing their emissions for about 1%/year like the EU has been doing for the past 3 decades, the problem will be addressed.
> Did you though the same when we were told that in 20 year the Earth would be unhabitable due to the holes in the ozone layer
Yeah, it's really strange that a planetary risk doesn't come to pass when society reacts swiftly and does what science recommends them to do (i.e. banning CFCs, which the world did in the Montreal treaty).
When counteracting what I said, you conveniently left aside:
1: The part where we, at the time, were told that the hole would take hundreds of years to close: It didn't. (Pear Reviewed article from 1996: https://www.nap.edu/read/9042/chapter/1#6)
So what you're saying is, the fact we were wrong about how long it would take to recover proves that the whole thing was a farce? Your data says nothing to counter whether the ozone hole was actually a major problem (spoiler: it was).
The fact that China is flaunting the rules the international community agreed on means what, exactly? The undeniable fact is the ozone hole did NOT continue to grow, because the majority of the world halted their use of CFCs. And wouldn't you know it, when we stopped using CFCs we stopped fucking up our ozone!
Sure, there's been plenty of scares in the past. Many of them even seemed extremely legitimate and had plenty of esteemed voices behind them.
But let's not talk in the abstract here. We're talking about climate change now. In 2019. And I believe very strongly that our planet is going through unprecedented changes that are caused by human activity. Those changes will result in suffering for a huge number of fellow members of my beloved species.
If you don't believe the same things I do, that's cool. I truly hope I'm wrong and you're right.
