To think most people are concerned about climate change... but

[hopewithoutpanic]

Don't know what they can personally do to make an impact?

We can see the fires, floods and impact climate change is having in both near and far places.

It has to be a concern, right? This is something that could make our planet dramatically different within our and our children's lifetimes.

Would I be correct in thinking the issue is that is individuals just don't know what (aside from recycling / trying to reduce meat etc) they can do to make a real difference?

@MintyFreshOne

By promoting the burning of fossil fuels you are personally proposing that we condemn the global poor, the very people you purport to support, to hardship, ever increasing poverty and early death.

Bangladesh is one of the world's countries most vulnerable to sea level rises induced by climate change. It has land borders with India and Burma among others. It's sea border is a maze of rivers and estuaries. It needs those rivers to release the monsoon rains. You are actually proposing an environmental intervention that would have the potential to cause more damage than the unmitigated disasters posted by @Mysticguru up thread.

You clearly have no idea of the science of climate change.

@HandyLady the link you provided doesn't support any of your claims whatsoever. Actually it supports the generally hypothesis that the steps we need to take to mitigate climate change and drive all aspects of sustainability will improve the lives of all of us, especially the poor.

My reasons for doubting climate change man made are:
We have only been measuring climate for 300 years and in that time we have industrialised so do we know if that had an impact or would the climate change naturally...we've had several ice ages including the little ice age of about 1200.
We removed both the passenger pigeon and the American bison in less than 50 years which seems to have no impact on the climate despite scientist claims that animal dung contributes to climate change...That was approximately 1 billion animals removed from the earth.
scientists have agendas...climate change leads to grants and academic career progress. Didn't easy Anglia university fake data
scientists can be wrong. Look at the views on cholesterol in eggs, diesel.

By promoting the burning of fossil fuels you are personally proposing that we condemn the global poor, the very people you purport to support, to hardship, ever increasing poverty and early death

We have decades of positive correlation between life expectancy and fossil fuel consumption—East Asian countries that have industrialised all have made huge gains in life expectancy and reductions in deaths from natural disasters.

Why not extend this to the rest of the developing world? Do they not deserve to be protected from hot and cold weather? Do they not deserve to have access to reliable electricity? Modern kitchens instead of indoor (god forbid dung) fires?

You have no proof that climate change will harm more than poverty. Poverty demonstrably kills—and cheap fossil fuels are a way out of that. Follow the East Asian model into wealth and prosperity.

You have nothing to offer developing countries, to be frank.

Bangladesh is one of the world's countries most vulnerable to sea level rises induced by climate change

And yet this:

Bangladesh, however, has also drastically reduced its cyclone-related deaths, by more than 100 fold since 1970 – an accomplishment noted in disaster risk reduction circles and backed up by a data-driven investigation by The New Humanitarian

www.thenewhumanitarian.org/investigation/2021/12/2/how-Bangladesh-is-beating-the-odds-on-climate-disaster-deaths

That’s while the population has gone up, by the way.

@Elvis1956 My reasons for doubting climate change man made are:

We have only been measuring climate for 300 years and in that time we have industrialised so do we know if that had an impact or would the climate change naturally...we've had several ice ages including the little ice age of about 1200.

But we can and do measure temperature change and climate over the course of thousands years of years. Whether this is tree ring data, ice cores, bog samples (seeds and pollen), geological formations, silts etc etc. We really can measure temperature and climate change to a high level of confidence over exceptionally long periods of time.

These multiple sources of data can let us identify individual influences on climate change - e.g. solar activity, the Earths orbit round the sun etc. What is beyond doubt is that the sun is currently in an inactive phase (this has been measured by counting sunspots) so if the sun was behind all this we'd be in another mini-ice-age. Except we're not.

We removed both the passenger pigeon and the American bison in less than 50 years which seems to have no impact on the climate despite scientist claims that animal dung contributes to climate change...That was approximately 1 billion animals removed from the earth.

I have no idea how much impact the extinction of passenger pigeons might have had, I'd expect very little. I've also not seen any study comparing bison impact with current beef, dairy and associated modern agricultural techniques that replaced them.

Scientists don't claim that animal dung, aerobically digested or composted, contributes significantly to climate change, this would apply to previous wild bison herds. It is actually the methane emissions from flatulence (both ends), and much more significantly the anaerobic digestion of effluent in large clamps that releases significant amounts of CH4, combined with intensive monocrop agriculture to feed these animals.

scientists have agendas...climate change leads to grants and academic career progress.

That's pretty naive to be honest. Head here if you want some insight into research funding in the UK. If you really really want to get into the nitty gritty of academic funding you'll need to get into the various select committee minutes (which I wouldn't wish on anyone TBH).

Didn't easy Anglia university fake data

Oh gosh this has been debunked so many times. A huge number of scientific studies give a range of data outputs. This link gives a good overview of the spikiness of what is measured versus how that data might be smoothed to make it easily digestible. I've recently been asked asked to reduce over two hundred pages of text and data into three ppt slides for people with a two minute attention span.

scientists can be wrong.

Of course, but in a world of peer reviewed papers and continual progress they might be out be a few percentage points (see above) buts it's almost unheard of that the fundamental science is wrong.

Please, if you have any questions I'll try to answer them as best I can.

Daftasabroom, I'm so pleased you're taking the time to post on this thread; really interesting links!

Hi @Elvis1956 there's a really good primer on ice-cores here. This is an extract:

The oldest ice cores, from East Antarctica, provide an 800,000-year-old record of Earth’s climate. How do we know they’re that old? Each season’s snowfall has slightly different properties than the last. These differences create annual layers in the ice that can be used to count the age of the ice, just like rings inside a tree.

Additionally, as the ice compacts over time, tiny bubbles of the atmosphere—including greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane—press inside the ice. These air pocket “fossils” provide samples of what the atmosphere was like when that layer of ice formed, LeGrande said. “Scientists can directly measure the amount of greenhouse gases that were in the atmosphere at that time by sampling these bubbles,” she added.

Personally I think it's pretty cool we measure climate and temperature over an 800,000 year time span. I'd like to know who had the job of counting the layers?

There's a good graphic here of temperature since the last glaciation.

A more technical page by the British Antarctic Survey

I think that most people just think what they do is a drop in the ocean and therefore not worthwhile or impactful.

The intense irony of this comment really struck me. If most people actually took worthwhile steps the impact would be immense.

Yes smog was burning coal. A lot less motorised vehicles in use in the 60's. Even in 1970 we were living withing one planet, now we need 1 and 3/4 planets!
But we can each do what we can. It is unlikely to affect the outcome because since we knew about our affect on climate change, we're increased emissions by 30% globally.

Globally, a full switch to renewables would be brilliant. But not everyone can afford the investment - I'm off grid except for when I have to heat my house in winter. I drive an ICE vehicle, would have liked a switch to hybrid, but none available when my car went kaput 2 weeks ago 😞 but I 'offsett' my impacts through mangrove planting.

Carry on doing what you can, but you're right when you say it's bigger than us.

We need stronger governmental leadership globally, better to feel a financial impact now than live in a dangerous climate from 2030 onwards....

But collectively we can make a difference by doing these very things, and if the majority are much less meat, went electric for their cars where possible and re-used where possible there would be a huge impact. I'm all for lobbying parliament but unfortunately lobbyists who are paid huge amounts by powerful industry players hold much more sway over the politicians to ensure laws aren't passed that would protect the climate but erode profit. Plus governments don't want to be sued by big companies in corporate courts - check these out if you thought the law applied equally to all. And we've allowed our right to protest to be criminalised through the police crime and sentencing act and now a new public order act. So really these changes you think would be ineffective would be the only effective way forward but we need to work together on this! Take away the dand for meat and oil and things will get better. We can all do something, just as everyone did something to stop the fur trade - we stopped buying fur. Don't think we can't make a difference because we can and the planet needs us, as do our children.

it might not stop climate change but it stops people expecting a plastic bag every time they go shopping then chucking it away after 5 mins. cant see whats wrong with that

Grow up containsnuts of course it makes a difference. Everyone has to do what they can to protect the planet. If everyone was that selfish we’d be even more screwed than we are now. People don’t seem to understand that it can always get worse. I don’t want that for my kids, thanks.

Great work thank you Daftasabroom

The current trajectory is locked in for several decades even if all emissions stopped tomorrow. Changing our lifestyle now is about mitigating the effects of climate change in the relatively far future, not about stopping it.
I read an article in the Times last week that calculated the breakeven point between the costs of doing nothing and the costs of taking major action now and the date calculated was 2080 - in my case that's relevant to my children and grandchildren. I won't be alive.

Cut right back on using the Internet. CO2 emissions from the Internet are higher than from total global air traffic.

Stop buying stuff from China. This graph shows Britain's emissions compared with China. In fact our race to net zero is contributing to total global emissions because we have just outsourced our emissions to them.

Reducing or quitting meat & dairy is another huge area we as consumers can influence. Farmers should be able to adapt and provide the plant based proteins we need to replace them. Again the government can help here with grants and subsidies to convert. Ridiculous

Better to work on foodstuffs that reduce or eliminate gasses from farm animals.

Growing crops, on an economic level, requires inputs (fertilizers, ground prep/harvesting/tractors burning diesel) these produce large amounts of green house gasses plus many parts of the UK are just not suitable for crop growing AND these crops end up being highly processed... again not great for us or the environment.

Derxa will confirm we often do not agree but on this 100%

@TonTonMacoute Not only that, many countries exclude highly polluting activities from their net zero count... i.e shipping aviation agri emissions.... UK and USA exclude the first two and NZ the last... other counties do similar... its all a bit of a con really.

Mistymountain nobody seems to know what the current trajectory might be though. The sea heatwave and massively melting icecaps etc are happening in a much more extreme way than predicted aren’t they? And are expected to have very unpredictable knock on effects. So I think no environmentally protective step is wasted for the near and far future since we only have one planet and it’s better to avoid devastation than try to rebuild (how would we even do that?) after it.

Actually it's really tricky to assign emissions from aviation and shipping. Do you assign them to the country the vessel is registered in? The port of departure or arrival? What do you do if a ship or plane makes multiple stops? Do you assign emissions from sheep farming to country of origin or the country of consumption?

(There's no right or wrong answer BTW)

I agree OP. I think everyone would say they are concerned. But there is a lack of education about exactly WHAT we need to be concerned about.

What is "climate change" exactly? What will it make our planet look like in 50-100 years? What will be the effects on us as humans?

There also isn't clear enough guidance about simple, practical steps we can take in order to help. Plus the only groups who can really do anything about it are the worlds governments.

@zingally there's a couple of threads on MN

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/climate_change/4667124-positive-action-on-climate-change-and-sustainability?page=4

The planet will recover and, hopefully, will have rid itself of the biggest plague it's seen - humankind

You have a different idea of hope to mine if you believe the tortuous genocide of billions of people and the immense and unimaginable human suffering that would result is in any way a hopeful outcome.

What an evil and twisted philosophy. Hopefully, everyone's grandchildren and their offspring will suffer the collapse of all the systems that kee them alive. Yes, you keep hoping that happens, dear...