Anyone else want climate change further up the political agenda? It should be in the news every day.

[MrsAlexxis]

I am increasingly worried about global
warming, but although I have tried to do my bit for decades, I find myself reading more about Harry and Megan’s returns to the UK than climate change in the papers and politicians and industry leaders are just pressing on with their data centres which will consume even more AI and we have peoole
like Trump in charge who don’t even believe in climate change. We are ruining the planet for future generations and not even taking much about it. Is it only me feeling helpless watching this unfold?

@SmokeywaterI feel like I see it on here all the time - people saying ‘nothing can be done’ and ‘it’s too late so you may as well just live your life’. Maybe it is bots - who knows? But I do find it frustrating. Of course a co-ordinated government plan is needed, but that will only come from public pressure, so we can all play a role. I guess I want to feel hopeful that something can be done, otherwise I feel despair.

Well I agree it cant just be one risk
And all doom and gloom would send into despair
But keeping it high profile, maintaining efforts and more (utterly ignoring reform and trump et al) is non negotiable

I agree. I know people saying ‘it’s too late so just live your lives now’ in response to this exceptionally hot summer.
To me that’s a false sense of security. We can’t break the environment and still live in it.
it’s blind pessimism. Like saying ‘I’ll vote for the chaos candidate because things can’t get any worse than they are now, surely’’
Things CAN always get worse so in that sense we should definitely be never giving up hope. We should always keep our best to help turn the situation around. At lest that way we can begin to look our kids in the eye.

People think it's fake. The more it's in the news the more they think this...

There will always be some people who thank god (instead of the NHS paramedics and surgeons) for saving their life after a car accident, or whatever. Fine. Doesn’t mean we don’t need the paramedics or the ambulance or surgeons and hospitals.

'People' don't care about Megan and Harry. Have you not seen the million posts asking why the media is pushing a narative the UK public really do not give 2 shits about largely.

Media publishes what they want you to look at, usually because they don't want you to look at something else.

I don't fly, I don't drive, I don't eat meat, I don't have a dog, I shop in charity shops. I only have the heating on for a couple of hours a day. I am doing my bit.

Same, except I fly occasionally.

It is in the news every day.

How many days this year has it not been?

Genuinely.

Think about it.

Heat wave, fires, floods.

Come up with a day it hasn't been on the news.

News presenters saying' oh what a gorgeous summer" when there's drought, wildfires, strikes by nurses and bus drivers...

I haven't seen them do that this year. But every single time the ongoing drought and water shortages and fires and lack of rain etc is mentioned, it is discussed in the context of, and linked to, climate change.
Are you actually watching news broadcasts from this year or are you in some weird time loop watching TV from ten years ago?

No I don’t. One of the reasons we have such ridiculously high energy bills is Ed Mliband’s net zero goals. Absorbable for the middle classes, less so for the poor.

Truth is, we are going to have to adapt to a changed world. At 8 billion and rising people, there really isn’t any putting the genie back in the bottle here. The living standards people want is going to continue to have a huge impact.

Although humans are a highly co-operative species we simply aren’t evolved to co-operate on the global scale needed, nor are we evolved for long term thinking. Humans are evolved for immediate or short term threats.

And on an individual citizen level, hardly anyone wants to make undersirable changes to their life. So they’ll pat themselves on the back for recycling but still fly abroad on holiday. Two parent working families are also time poor, and that means they make unenvironmentally friendly choices, driving instead of walk/bus/bike and buying ready meals etc. The environmental choice is often a luxury choice for those with more money or time.

So yes, there will be some environmentally friendly changes made, more electric cars for eg, more recycling as it saves landfill costs for councils, but we will also have to adapt to live in a changing climate. The sheer volume of humans will continue to change the planet, species and ecosystems on it.

In the highly competitive media world, media is very much pushing what their base readership wants to see. They go meticulously over their ‘clicks’ and views to see what people are reading or watching.

You are speaking as if we are still in the state media, one channel days. Thats gone. We have an increasingly division created media precisely because they are chasing what their public wants, so that they can survive as a media business, and that is having an exaggerating effect.

True that on a global scale we can't control emissions but our government could and should've been doing a lot more to prepare us for extreme weather, rising prices and food shortages. We need better insulated buildings, more public transport, more support for British farming among many things.

I do dislike it when people say things like ‘break the environment’. People shouldn’t lie to make their case. Humans cannot ‘break the environment’. ( what even is your definition of this?!). Nor is the planet dying. What we are doing is changing the environment in ways that may cause a lot of suffering. But life will continue on this planet.

Humans will continue too. We are a remarkably adaptable species who can live in climates as diverse as the frozen wastes where the Inuit live to the Arabian deserts.

I have heard weather reporters in recent weeks use the kind of language that @friedakleinis talking about. The rain disappearing is described as the weather “improving” and there are mentions of “lovely sunshine.” In the midst of this terrible drought and its impact on farmers, how on earth can the rain disappearing be described as an “improvement”?

Broadcasts from this year! This has been widely discussed on another thread too, so I am not the only one who has noticed this.

You must be joking op. Justin Rowlatt the climate correspondent for the BBC is for yelling at me about climate change.
I agree about the tone of weather reports. They are always addressed to gardeners and ‘growers’. No love you mean farmers.

I'm seriously considering moving into an ethically sourced cardboard box by the side of a stream and just eating dandelions (plentiful) and seasonal weeds (plentiful) to survive. I shall compost my leftovers and poop into a homemade compost which I can then sell to raise money to send to various net zero charities throughout the UK.

This is hyperbole. You don't have to go that far, and you know that.

I actively watch less news, for sanity preservation. Life is hard enough as it is

Bombarding people with warnings about climate change will just make them turn off. It’s happening already.

The trouble with calls for personal, everyday action to help combat climate change is that it’s always some combination of pointlessness, being utterly implausible or one rule for me and another for thee.

I very much doubt that ever more complicated recycling rules in Britain will make the slightest bit of difference to the world’s climate. Or solar panels. Or campaigns against ‘excess’ food packaging. Or a host of other gimmicks.

Asking people to change whether and what they consume is always some foolish appeal from the well-meaning to everyone else not to buy things or use transport or generally consume energy. This will never work. People are free to buy, spend and live as they wish. I don’t believe anyone should hector anyone else about how they live their lives, in the cause of climate change. We do not want to live in a world without travel, luxuries, convenience or frivolousness, and why should we? None of this hairshirtery will make any difference anyway.

And climate pontificators are perfectly happy to do lots of things that they deplore in others. If policy makers preach against air travel, don’t fly all in from all over the world to some green summit. If people concerned about climate change want to spread the word on the internet they can’t complain if others use it too, for their own reasons, including for AI. If the middle class eco-minded want to go to Tuscany for the summer they should pipe down about package tours to Spain. And so on.

If there are changes to be made they need to be made in labs and research centres where energy efficiency can be promoted in products, production, energy storage and the like, and more sustainable versions of materials produced.

It's never out of the news.

We absolutely can “break the environment”. Depletion of the Ozone layer was almost entirely the fault of human activity. This was a major crisis in the 80s and 90s. The kind of UVB exposure previously only seen around the equator were being seen much further afield. This impacted crops, polar ice caps and posed a massive risk to human health. If it had been allowed to continue, we’d be in a much worse condition. Nobody complained when we banned CFCs to rectify the situation and although the situation hasn’t completely reversed, it has moved out of the critical stage and should be completely reversed by 2075. An entirely manmade substance used for 60 years, once banned takes 80 years for the environment to heal itself. If you want a micro example of the damage we can do, take a look at any brownfield site. These sites cannot repair themselves over time (except in a few rare exceptions) they can’t be built on without remediation which involves digging out the crap and dumping it elsewhere, causing its own problems. If left unused, they leach toxins into the ground water which in turn affects the availability of safe drinking water, and can make land nearby impossible to sustain plant life. The sites themselves become overgrown with aggressive, invasive weeds which do little for our plant reproductive cycle, vital for keeping us alive.

Of course “life” will still exist, people sure do live in some very extreme climates, but is that the best you would hope for? Life in those climates is extremely harsh, and is becoming harder with the affects on climate. They are entirely self sufficient and must rely on what the environment can provide. There are also nonecumene areas, entirely uninhabitable because of extreme heat or cold, where life could only be sustained by the very kind of mechanical heating and cooling which causes issues for the environment. These will only increase and by 2070, areas where millions of people currently live will become uninhabitable. The levels of migration will far outstrip where they are now and as more and more of the planet becomes unliveable.

”Life” may continue, but “life as we know it” or even anything close to it will disappear.

https://earthbound.report/2021/03/23/the-uninhabitable-parts-of-the-earth/

The reporting on this issue is very variable. For example, I listened to an excellent R5 phone-in including calls from experts on the drought & flooding a few weeks back, which increased my understanding of the issue & made it clear what local & central government, the water companies & farmers are able to do about this issue & the benefits & difficulties of these. The phone-in did make me think about stuff that I could do (eg putting compost on the garden to improve soil quality so it retains water) but it was also clear that this is very minor stuff & that the government etc are the ones who need to act.

Whereas this morning there was a really poor interview re “e-bikes” & fires including
-interviewing someone whose e-scooter caught fire but no mention that these are illegal unless part of a hire scheme
-no explanation of the differences between e-bicycles, e-motorbikes or e-scooters
-poor explanation that this is a primarily a problem with vehicles / conversion kits sold over the internet / secondhand & rarely affects those from reputable dealers.
-ended with an emotional warning no to buy an e-scooter (that aren’t actually road legal)
It really wouldn’t be that difficult to research this as there’s a really informative report from the All-Party Parliamentary Walking & Group looking into this which makes recommendations & there was a much better interview on R4 Today recently. The poor reporting is also really damaging & not just because it puts people off a low emissions form of transport - the report cites both disability groups & bike shops complaining that it’s affecting the take-up of legal electric bicycles which don’t have the battery problems.