This isn't our heat wave, but the next one could be

[orangeleavesinautumn]

Or if we mess up the jet stream, arctic winters.

We have really messed up horrifically, haven't we.

I am scared its too late to put right

Against my better judgement I started reading this thread but could only go so far. Folk on here seem to be hand wringing about small things that are tinkering around the edges. The effect that our activities are having on global temperatures is like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
We are on a planet that has been around for millions of year which has experienced several mass extinction events and numerous climactic shifts. The effect we are having is like a single flea on an elephant. CO2 is but one of the greenhouse gases. It is given off by the oceans, volcanos and the very earth itself (hence plants that can fix carbon) The human contribution to the total is minimal in the overall scheme of things.

Over population = over consumption. The exploitation of our natural resources to obtain minerals to support our lifestyle- now that's another story. Where do people think the lithium comes from to run EV and mobile devices. Where is the power to run all these vehicles going to come from. There were reports last winter that we could have power outages as there wasn't enough capacity to keep up with demand if we had the cold winter that was predicted. If we all bought EVs then we'd really be up shit creek in cases of power cuts.

twitter.com/KyleTrainEmoji/status/1680243524124516352?t=JR_bpDKw2CC6eNBSOWZsYw&s=19

This is what China is doing. If this is true the world needs to catch up.

It's true that we need to keep pressure on big businesses and politicians, but switching your accounts is still a very impactful things to do as an individual. They rely on customer numbers to secure assets and loans. They look at what invidual customers are worth to them over time, so it still matters to the banks if you move away even if you dont have much in your account. Switch it green have researched that the average student is worth 1.51 million to their bank over a lifetime https://www.instagram.com/p/CrJUEYYLFOg/?igshid=YmM0MjE2YWMzOA==

I've just seen this idiocy. Why did you send this to me? My posts made it perfectly clear that people should be contacting their MPs and pushing for things that they actually can do to try to mitigate some of the inevitable fallout of this on the UK population and expressed my frustration that people wring their hands in threads like this but do not do this and are happy to vote for politicians tinkering around the edge's of the UK's most pressing issues, implementing and suggesting nonsense policies that will make no significant difference to anything in terms of our economy, the impact of climate change on the UK population (or anything else worthwhile or important).

My point in the post you quoted was that UK politicians have no power whatsoever to do anything significant about changing the trajectory of climate change. If the entire population of the UK vanished into thin air overnight so never created any pollution of used any resources again it would make no measureable difference whatsoever to the trajectory of climate change.

I didn't require your patronising comment attempting to explain the role of an MP to me. 🙄🙄🙄

I saw something on this which said that the melting ice caps would mean less salty water, which could stop the gulf stream.

You couldn't possibly think a little differently now though just because your mother gave you meat every day... surely you're an adult who cares about their future, the planets' future.... Oh wait 🙄

let the population fail dramatically,
basically let’s go back in time but with better medicine

Better medicine is part of the problem. We’ve got too good at keeping ourselves alive.

Going vegan won't help when you have people like my MIL who has been vegan for years and then got 2 meat eating dogs who she is happy to feed factory farmed chickens and pigs to all day long.

I also know someone in Extinction Rebellion who screamed at me for continuing to eat dairy. She started a 'birth strike' and declared she would never have kids because of climate change, and went around saying people with kids were basically immoral. Guess who just got a 'fur baby' ?

Assuming a 50 year working life that equates to them making £30,000 per year from each customer - almost as much as the average UK salary. Very plausible...

@Emmamoo89

just cos that happened when you were a kid doesn’t mean it should continue for the next generations

NOOONE needs to eat meat everyday

you love it? Tough

Another reason we need plenty of investment in fossil fuels is for the pharmaceutical industry which enables modern medicine.

I completely agree. Human activity I think is having some kind of impact on CO2 but its all tinkering.

It amazes me that people handwring about so much but if you have a big house that's fine as long as you can afford it even though it's blatant over consumption. And hardly anyone mentions trees or natural vegetation, there was one mention of plastic grass. It's all about stopping average people enjoying their lives instead.

OP YANBU but it doesn’t mean we can’t reduce the rate of change by making the changes we need to make. We are so ridiculously oblivious to the carbon footprints behind our lifestyles.

Stop buying stuff! Recycling still uses energy and creates waste. Focus should be on REDUCING and REUSING.

The Rhodes holiday thread running-answers seem to be to buy more stuff to handle the heat. Stuff has carbon footprint.

It is our fault that the world is warming, it’s not something that is happening to us-it is us! Anthropogenic climate change is fact. (I have spent 20 years studying and working in natural sciences).

Eat meat if you must but it doesn’t need to be every meal or even every day. Choose high welfare and less of it and feel better that the animals have had a better quality existence in their short lives.

Eat less in general. We are an overweight nation.

Emissions from domestic transport are a huge problem for greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Domestic transport means every time you get in a vehicle with an engine. Think before just popping to the shops in the car for a loaf of bread…

All these initiatives to reduce emissions which are being pushed by energy companies and government etc (renewable energy, CCS, developing hydrogen, electric cars etc) do still have huge environmental impacts in raw materials and engineering and cost huge amounts of money which the UK government have to bankroll to get off the ground. It would be so much easier/cheaper/more efficient to just reduce our consumption.

The WEF are not your friends, they are the people who want us to:
Live in high density low space apartments in cities.
Eat bugs instead of meat.
Never travel - no car or flights for you.
No fashion - rationing for number of new clothes items per person per year.
Only use digital currency (temporary money with social and environmental controls on what you can purchase with currency units that expire if not used in time)

Here is how they manufacture consent (from the WEF Empowering sustainable consumption: A model for accelerating social change - May 2022)

There were reports last winter that we could have power outages as there wasn't enough capacity to keep up with demand if we had the cold winter that was predicted. If we all bought EVs then we'd really be up shit creek in cases of power cuts

Due to lack of capacity in the national grid. No point even connecting new power sources to it because it can't transmit the required power during high demand periods, due to no long-term plan for appropriate infrastructure upgrades having been implemented or for energy storage etc.

Also therefore selling energy that we can't use or store to others and buying back in surge periods at vastly inflated prices. Even buying hydro power in from Norway when our country is surrounded by coastline.

Similar to water infrastructure where no appropriate upgrades have been made, no requirement to make them before building more dwellings when there is insufficient infrastructure for the existing ones, no new reservoirs built in over 40 years, no system for moving water between areas as required, unnecessarily processing all water to drinking water quality even if it is only to be used for flushing toilets (again due to no infrastructure investment), sewage discharges, leaks, "water shortages" in one of the rainiest countries on Earth, etc...

Plenty of land to have plans in place to be able to feed the population self-sufficiently if required and therefore have food security. Maybe not what they'd ideally like to eat but if it came to it, I'm sure they'd be grateful their Government had a plan in place to ensure there was sufficient food for all. Has it been planned for? Of course not.

See a pattern?

Until recently I didn't worry about climate change. I accepted expert opinion, but thought of it as something down the road. That 40 degree nightmare last summer totally changed my mind. I no longer needed expert opinion. It was right there in front of me. A rainy northern European island should not be hitting 40 degrees. It felt unnatural – and scary. But I still clung to the hope that it was one off. Now it's happening again.

God knows what the future will bring. On top of that, the world's population has exploded in the last hundred or so years. In 1900 there were just over a billion humans. Today there are eight billion, and heading for ten. And don't tell me the birth rate is dropping. That may be true in Europe, but it's not the case in Africa, where women still have an average of five kids. In fact, Africa's population is going to double by 2050. In any case, whether we're having fewer babies or not, the simple fact remains – our population is eight times larger than it was in 1900!! And an unstable climate combined with a massive population is bad news. I often look at primary school children and think "what kind of world are you going to grow up in?" How are we going to feed and house ten billion human beings in a world of droughts, flooded cities and crop failures?

@WhysSheabitch

How many kids do you have?

how old are your youngest 2?

I agree it’s a nightmare. I’m sitting here at work which is very near a major airport and flights are literally going overhead every 40 seconds or so. We are all so addicted to our cars and foreign holidays. I’m as bad as anyone. Really going to try and not fly at all in 2024. Unfortunately already booked on a flight ( by dh) for this year. I don’t know where the answer lies. Our whole world economy is like a juggernaut out of control. What can change this??

The short answer is that we're not. There will be chaotic population movements on a scale never seen before and war over the remaining resources. Hence my repeated posts asking why very few voters seem to be putting any pressure on UK politicians to implement the measures required to protect the UK population from this as much as possible in terms of energy, food and water security.

This cannot be stopped now, sadly. The best we can do is try to mitigate some of the damage to our own country. Yet all the people posting here saying they are worried about the situation have declined to answer my question ^^ and want to continue to debate whether astroturf or having a dog or going on holiday will have more impact when in reality nothing anybody in the UK does it going to make any measureable difference to the climate trajectory.

BBC have a live thread running where they are answering questions

This breaks my heart too.

Sadly no one really gives a fuck about the affects this is having on animals. Wildfires, loss of habitat, warmer oceans etc, until the loss of animals starts to affect us.

Climate change is a supreme example of a 'massively wicked' problem which only cooperation and long term thinking might have solved. And as a species, we're terrible at both.

It's terrifying, because the warming we're seeing now was 'baked in' years ago. Even if we stopped all fossil fuels tomorrow, it's hard to see how we'll avoid unthinkable consequences.

Exactly. We need to stop blaming the government for not finding magic solutions to our mess, and stop making it to start with.

TBH - before I was fatalistic about it, but now I just want somewhere that he can live (and not just scrape an existence licking algae off rocks, either).