What should be done about climate change?

[Rfthyhuj]

There are many people on another thread salivating at the idea of the five climate change protestors going to jail. I’m not an expert, but I know enough to understand that global warming is already having catastrophic effects on the world’s poorest.

What can the world do? What can the UK government do? I believe that we should up aid funding to allow developing countries to invest in green technology. I’ve never thought about it in huge detail, but am really shocked at the vitriol shown to the protestors for attempting to raise awareness of how serious the situation is. I don’t want another debate about the protest or the prison sentence, but am really interested in hearing about what people believe should happen to create change and avoid disaster?

They won't do anything. People are allowed plastic gardens, to litter, drive 1 mile to the shop (if able bodied)....

I'm not denying it. I think it's huge. But we can't do a huge amount compared to the bigger nations. We will never get on top of it unfortunately.

There are some awesome metal things at the bottom of the sea. The chemical reaction is creating oxygen or something. Already permits have gone in to get them mined/collected as they are needed for batteries etc. we will never stop it.

It will escalate until people are fighting over crops and another war will start.

it's something huge I can't influence so I'm not going to stop flying or having my cats. It is what it is. We've gone too far. And the changes needed aren't going to be impacted by me making a few changes. (And being honest I don't want to!).

@ZeroFucksGivenToday clearly your name lives up to your character. What about your children’s futures ? Or your grandchildren’s ? There will be huge population changes round the corner as people move out of once inhabitable areas to more northern milder climes which in themselves will get ever smaller. Crops are already failing, prices rising, swaths of the third world are becoming reliant on good will from other developed nations because there’s a drought or flooding wiping out whole industries (which we funnily enough rely on). Think immigration is massive now, lol wait for the next few years.

I agree with everything you've said. (Well maybe not about living up to my character).

I work in defence, we spend millions building machines for defence. I'm not going to leave my career.

I love holidays and fly once or twice a year. I'm not giving that up. It would make zero difference me doing that.

I already recycle, reuse and do what I can within reason, but I'm not going to give up holidays or my job.

Nothing.
The majority of human race is blood hungry and war mongering. Just look around the world.

I recycle but I am enjoying travelling, IDGAF. I am not living a miserable life for people I don’t know. Sorry!

Let us die out. Its sheer arrogance to assume we should go on forever.

The only thing that will make the slightest difference is reducing the global population by 2 or 3 billion. But I can’t see that happening voluntarily.
There will be wars over fertile land and water eventually i suppose which will go some way to thinning the population out. Nature will put things right, but it won’t be fun living through it…

I'm not in denial but the UK government can't have it all ways

Reduce the immigration and house building as there is a correlation

I’m not sure why people are coming on to say what they won’t be giving up.

I recently read that China uses more concrete every 3 years than the United States has used in the last century. If this is true (and I think it probably is), then you haven’t a buckleys chance of stopping climate change. There are things you can do conceivably to make the UK more resilient to climate change, and I agree with a PP about changing energy sources dramatically, but the global emissions aren’t coming from us.

The poor want to live the same sort of lives we do. They want concrete foundations in their buildings, they want steel in their roofs (sp?), they want air conditioning and cars.

The real problem with the political response to climate change is that it is based on telling people to stop consuming energy. Thats just another way of rich people telling other people they should stay poor. And that’s bullshit. Why shouldn’t people in China have concrete? Why shouldn’t people in Africa have air conditioning?

What we need are the greatest sources of pollution to be revolutionised by technology to make them less polluting. Investment in mass scale nuclear power, innovation in building materials, new and different methods of designing and building transport and shipping.

While coal is cheap, that’s what people will burn. If you use uranium or thorium instead, and that becomes cheaper, then people will use that. There needs to be less hectoring poor people to “pollute less” and more innovation in “here’s a way to have what we have but cheaper and more efficiently”.

Animal agriculture is a huge part of the problem. The emissions it creates are absolutely insane, flying and everything else truly pails into insignificance in comparison. 91% of all amazon rainforest destruction is for meat. Eating a diet that's free from meat, dairy, fish and eggs is by far the best thing anyone can do.

1. Stop having children

1. Stop flying

1. Use cars much less or never

1. Stop buying shit you don't need

1. Heat the person, not the environment

1. Stop eating meat

Fundamentally, the people in control who can do something don’t care because selfishly they know they won’t be alive to live the catastrophic consequences, it’s as simple as that. This greed for economic growth at ALL cost has been driven by privileged white men mainly from the baby boomers generation who are now in their 60-70s.

Ultimately when a very small proportion of wealthy people travel a lot, change their clothes to keep up with new trends, own more than one vehicle and change their interiors frequently, the impact on the planet in negligible. When millions of people live like this the impact is damaging. Governments I think need to decide whether to ration all of these activities so that everybody, regardless of their position and finances, for example, gets x flights a year or is allowed to purchase X number of new clothes per year. Or they increase the cost so it goes back to being something only the wealthy can do.

Personally I think governments need to work together and use legislation to combat it but it would take a worldwide approach. In the 80s the ozone layer wasn't fixed by everybody using less cfcs. It was fixed by legislating against the companies producing them and the same thing needs to happen again. But I fear that corporate greed has taken us too far to allow this to happen.

On a much smaller scale I would love for every home in the U.K. to be given a £50 or £100 garden centre voucher that could only be spent on pollinator friendly native plants, peat free compost, pots or window boxes).

I saw a lovely section in gardener's world about a year ago about a place in Canada or north USA I can't remember where all of the grassy verge areas on street pavements were given to people who wanted to garden them. It was so lovely and turned into a really community effort.

Not even "milder Northern climes" will necessarily remain habitable; when the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation current (AMOC) collapses ‐likely in the latter half of this century‐, Europe will see abruptly decreasing temperatures, rapidly increasing sea levels and an increase in freak weather events.
For now, Scandinavia seems to be impacted mainly by wild fires ravaging the ancient pine forests, but a severe drop in temperatures such as predicted following AMOC's collapse, will turn the whole region into an Arctic ante-chamber which will be impossibly dependent on imports from southern regions increasingly unable to supply.

Getting the full bingo set of answers here

It's chinas issue to sort ( as if we don't drive that by consumerism)
It's the rich s to sort
It's all there to control you
The climate has always changed, it's normal
'scientist X" has said it's ok ( usually not qualified)
I want the uk to be warmer ( ignoring mass migration and flooding)

Etc etc

They walk amongst us

This. No one cares. Look at how many people buy shit off Shein and Temu, drive their SUVs and have a dog

For my part, I started re-cycling 50 years ago, before it was a "thing", grow a lot of our own fruit and veg, haven't eaten meat for 50 years. Lots of clothes, furniture (real wood,) from charity shops
Bake from scratch. Solar panels, making average 600kws monthly, using 300 all electric. I did get rid of my diesel estate last year 15 years old, gone to my disabled son..kept in tip top condition, emissions wise by vehicle tech DH.. before moving, downsizing,near beach by hilly,we cycled,DH cycled to work 6 months of the year 25miles..I need a car to get to other disabled son. We don't have passports,last holiday was almost 16 years ago. I have a pretty small carbon footprint,all told.

Short term profit v long term damage

The hard work will have to be on a global scale.
On a personal scale, I walk where I can, holiday in England - usually by train. Recycle, only buy new clothes when needed. Eat meat less often. No pets. Insulated house so less need for heating.
None of this will make a difference in reality as proved by this thread - many people think it’s a load of old nonsense. The difference for me is I know I tried.

For me the biggest thing that needs to be done to protect not just the climate but our environment and earths limited resources is actually a complete overhaul of the economic model. Continuous growth is not compatible with making this planet a better place to live. Communism isn’t the answer either though.
On an individual basis I am more then happy to reduce, reuse and recycle, but that isn’t enough.

According to IPCC Sixth Assessment Report, in the last 170 years, humans have caused the global temperature to increase to the highest level in the last 2,000 years. The current multi-century period is the warmest in the past 100,000 years. The temperature in the years 2011-2020 was 1.09 °C higher than in 1859–1890. The temperature on land rose by 1.59 °C while over the ocean it rose by 0.88 °C. In 2020 the temperature was 1.2 °C above the pre-industrial era. In September 2023 the temperature was 1.75 °C above pre-industrial level and during the entire year of 2023 is expected to be 1.4 °C above it.

During my time in education I spent some time in climate change research while living overseas. Yes, global warming and climatic change are real; some debate as to whether it is due to natural causes or human causes, from my research I fully believe it is from human causes.

Despite this, (and I know the thread is not about the protesters as such) I do believe the protesters should have been sentenced. They are not in prison for raising awareness, they are in prison for things such as the blockades in London/M25 which caused huge disruption, meaning others missed their flights/holidays/hospital appointments/funerals/cancer treatments amongst other things. There is also the damage to public property or art treasures with paint/orange powder etc, necessitating thousands of pounds in clean-up. Protesting and the right to raise awareness should not come at the cost of damaging other's rights or causing unnecessary distress.

That said, we do have to do something. It would be better to raise awareness in peaceful ways, and ways in which engage the public rather than turning them against the idea of actually doing anything at all. Given the power of advertising on TV and social media they would be better fundraising and making some really good short, sharp docu-adverts which hit home and make people think, as a start.

The problem is, that as a global issue we can only begin to change the thinking and behaviour of our own country (and even that's difficult) not what other countries do. It is too easy to say we won't do anything because China/India/the rest of the world aren't listening.

The other problem is timescale. People only react when it affects them directly - look at the COVID pandemic. The world did something because people were dying then and there (and even then, there were the deny-ers). Climate change IS affecting the world (floods, storms, wildfires and so on) but not enough for all of us to be in danger of worldwide death right now, so people ignore it. They do not want to inconvenience themselves for the sake of three generations in the future.

As a country we could do so much with wind power, coastal energy generation, moving over to electricity entirely but power with that is produced ourselves. Every house should have solar panels on the roof for instance, but no-one wants to deface their home and who will pay for it? We could burn all our rubbish and use the power generated for clean energy production but they have discussed this since the 1960s and still we haven't built the very expensive plants to do this (and no-one wants such an industrial plant spoiling their view of the countryside).

Even amongst my own friends and family who are seriously worried about climate change and mankind's effect on the planet, as soon as I mention my own efforts at change - I only eat 2 meals a day, no longer fly, will give up owning a car as soon as I retire in the next few months, buy local produce and cook from scratch and so on - they immediately trot out the counter arguments: eg. my small contribution will do nothing well, families can't live like that, no point when governments won't listen and China is using coal...

To be honest, individuals won't do anything when it comes to making sacrifices themselves. Neither will governments, because they don't have the money, the resources, the know-how...nor do they want to lose votes. We will see the polar ice caps melt eventually, there will be desert down to Antarctica and up as far as the top of France, we will have intense heat, fresh water shortages and very small areas where human beings will migrate to in order to live (top of Scandinavia, parts of Greenland, Siberia)..... Problem is, we do not have direct proof of this, no-one believes the science and besides that, it's about 150 years away so no-one living cares that much either....

I find is very, very sad indeed.

@AngelusBell I don't dispute the temperature has risen. What I don't understand is how, without accurate data going back hundreds of thousands of years, anyone can say this isn't mainly a natural phenomenon.

Yes man is trashing the earth. I have no argument with that.

You’d be surprised.

https://interactive.carbonbrief.org/how-proxy-data-reveals-climate-of-earths-distant-past/

https://www.southampton.ac.uk/news/2020/09/climate-change-ocean-sediments.page#:~:text=The%20record%20of%20past%20climate,cyclic%20patterns%20of%20climate%20change.

https://www.bas.ac.uk/data/our-data/publication/ice-cores-and-climate-change/

If you want to read a book that explains climate science in layman’s terms, then I can recommend the author Fred Pearce.