In your opinion, what should we be most concerned about?

[TauroLomo]

The war?
Inflation?
Global warming?
The NHS?
Womens rights?

What else?

There has been very little but big, somewhat terrifying, news stories over the past couple of years. Sometimes I find it overwhelming, it’s almost as if my brain can’t decide what to worry about first.

In your personal opinion, what current issues either globally or closer to home, warrant more intense and concentrated attention?

And I know it does little use to worry about things we have no control over, perhaps that was a bad choice of phrase. But I suppose I want to educate myself better on what’s going on around us and would massively appreciate some views and opinions on what you deem to be most pressing.

Thank you.

AI
Superbugs
Another pandemic

And yours.

For the world? Global warming.

For the UK - reversing Brexit/rejoining the EU.

the problem with the depopulation argument is that it ignores the fact that there is a huge disparity in the carbon footprint of humans in different places. African women may be having more children but their entire family won’t exceed the carbon footprint of one westerner.

yes

Much of Europe has switched to sustainable farming practices thought to avert this disaster. The cause is mono cropping. Going back to crop rotation to include a year or two of grazing by livestock (sheep & cow poop is a natural fertiliser), can reset the soil nutrients. It’s one of the reasons why vegans are wrong about not eating meat saving the planet. We do need to eat less meat, but we also need the livestock we eat to be present in their hundreds of millions to keep the soil healthy for plant crops.

I’m not so pessimistic. The planet has been much hotter and much colder and life always persisted, even human life. They know now, for example, that the switch over to an Ice Age was much faster than previously thought, as in only a few decades to take hold. So the argument that past climate change took thousands of years is now a bit outdated.

@JoonT
I know somebody will reply that the birth rate is dropping. But that’s only true in some places.

The good news is that the falls have been offsetting the rises more and more the past sixty years. Currently global population growth is the slowest it has ever been and is quickly approaching zero growth, with a good chance of global decline in the next 150yrs or so per UN projections. The key to population not being on runaway growth is women’s rights, especially in reproduction and financial independence.

No, our hands are still clean. If you look at the CO2 emissions data even the data that includes the CO2 of producing everything we import plus to transport here, the U.K. has still reduced CO2 massively.

I worry about antibiotics not working for much longer.

And people dying of UTIs and tonsillitis etc.

Ody enough, global warming is the priority but also not the one I am scared about.

We're going to beat it. In part (ironically) because of Putin's disastrous war that forced everyone in Europe to accelerate their energy security plans.

It's cheaper to build renewables and to build gas or coal stations. It's actually cheaper to do so that to maintain existing coal stations (and that's staggering!). All car manufacturers are switching to electric, thanks to legislation and we are seeing significant decarbonisation in places like shipping and steel where a lot of the world's invisible emissions occur.

This is before we think about new battery technologies - there's some really exciting research being pushed into R&D at the moment that could solve our large scale storage problems.

I recommend signing up to Noahopinion on Substack and the Positive News Network for the latest on these stories. I also subscribe to FutureCrunch (positive journalism) that picks up a lot of the smaller announcements ignored by the mainstream outlets.

So, we will keep the world down to under 2 degrees and avoid life wipeout. I don't think we we will manage 1.5 degrees which means we are still going to get a lot of disruption, including mass migration, war, food security problems and species extinction.

That's going to be the next thing to work on.

UK-wide, I am concerned about the effects of the pandemic, Brexit and the recent price crunch - we've not seen it all play out yet and the recent spate of stabbings are the tip of the iceberg. It's going to get very ugly and I don't see any appetite from the Tories for fixing it.

Finally, just for fun, we're about to undergo the biggest demographic change in our history as we switch from having more young people to more old people and our populations shrink. That's going to test every assumption we have, from family planning and housing to healthcare and work. China and Japan are visibly doing it right now, with every other country (bar six), following.

Easy solution - don’t engage with the news. Ignorance is bliss

Currently global population growth is the slowest it has ever been and is quickly approaching zero growth, with a good chance of global decline in the next 150yrs or so per UN projections.

the downside of that is much of the west will be ageing.

it will be more expensive for us.

Thank you for giving me a bit of hope!

Mmmm.... Don't know how anyone could be daft enough to encourage ignorance really..

How much is that due to paying to offset with credits? Pay China to make the mess and Costa Rica to plant the trees.

CBDC
AI
Massive infertility crisis on horizon due to crashing sperm counts

I’m most concerned about another pandemic right now. I can see it happening again in my lifetime.

Why not? Increasingly, news is biased, heavily biased and is moving towards the US way of reporting. The BBC is supposed to be neutral but often isn't. ITV is a joke and has turned into opinion TV.

I still watch the news but there's often not much point as you only see the news they want you to see. It's not much different on-line.

Clean? You're kidding.

What about all the plastic we're selling to third world countries so we don't have to clean it up? I guess if we dump our rubbish elsewhere, we don't have to deal with it.

Antibiotic resistance?

AI - with ChatGPT you no longer know what is real. Has this been written by me? Who knows ???