Sick of being lectured about the climate crisis

[Soulesssummer]

I try my best to leave as little carbon footprint as possible.
Married with no kids and annual dual fuel bills are under£700
1 small car, holiday overseas once every 5 years.
So why do those wealthy families with 3,4, 5 plus kids who drive SUV tanks and holiday every year multiple times.,who consume £300 plus in energy bills monthly, have the audacity and blatant cheek to lecture others on the climate crisis.

It's like they have only just twigged their excessive greed and consumption just might now mean your kids futures are ruined.
It's making me so angry.

My dual fuel is £888 a year. How do you manage to get under £700, surely most of that is the daily charge just to be connected ?

They are in a flat and on a fix so that may help? Mine is similar to yours, £850, for a semi detached house, on the SVR. Standing charges are £292, so yes a huge proportion of my bill. Some flats hardly need heating at all but then it may be harder to get things dry without a tumble dryer, I don't know how that balances out.

Presuming your eg traveling across the globe and need to be at different countries in good time etc, I could be wrong but is it more fuel efficient to travel by plane vs the same distance by eg rail, or car etc.

Is the trip necessary at all? I'd class seeing family every five years as a necessary trip.

Interesting the that the massive egos I've observed in architects also extends to their partners as well.

🔨 nail 🤭 👏🏻

I'm talking about impact as a family and you have cherry picked there as I have said a few threads back that my job involves ensuring a human right is upheld, the carbon footprint for that role is minimal.

Do you honestly think your climate change dogma busting is convincing, seriously, the images are in front of us, the runaway climate change that is producing wild fires, floods, droughts, polar ice caps to melt, sea levels to rise, all accelerated by humans this is not an opinion it is fact!

Well retrofit solutions, it is not him personally solving the world's environmental problems but it is better than peddling out climate change denial propaganda on social media and insidiously promoting that agenda by belittling posters that you aren't aligned with.

Where do you think 'higher policy' requirements come from, what are they a result of, they are a result of what the public votes for, what the government needs to put on their agenda to win votes. The personal and the political reinforce each other on this topic, if you believe that is important stop making it someone else's problem. The 'elite' are not a majority of voters and we do live in a democracy last time I checked, unfortunately that is being eroded by all sorts of extreme nonsense being given a platform on the internet! You say you work in the industry, what are you, a Developer (makes sense if you are)

At the last glacial maximum (c. 20k YBP) CO2 levels had fallen to an all time low of around 180 ppm (well, the lowest in roughly 500 million years!).- only marginally higher than the level at which plants will start to die from lack of CO2. The long term decline in atmospheric CO2 levels has principally been caused by biomineralization (Moore, 2017, "The Positive Impact of CO2 Emissions on the Survival of Life on Earth", Frontier Centre for Public Policy).
There is nothing on the timescale of the geological record to suggest a strong causal relationship between atmospheric CO2 levels and global temperature. (See Nahle, 2009 - "Cycles of Global Climate Change, Biology Cabinet Journal; Pagani et al, 2005 "Marked Decline in Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Concentrations During the Palaeocene", Science 309, pp 600-603..). There are extremely long periods when CO2 and temperature trends have been completely out of sync.
Are you suggesting CO2 levels higher than current levels would be incompatible with human life? Our mammalian ancestors existed for millions of years with levels of at least 2000 ppm. and there is nothing to suggest that we could not physically cope with levels up to 1000ppm. There is an interesting alternative perspective that, in the long term, we were risking CO2 levels dropping to dangerously low levels (and that we were sort of unwittingly saved by the industrial revolution!).
We are still in the Pleistocene Ice Age and the temperatures and sea levels being experienced during this Holocene interglacial are lower than those of preceding interglacials.

Totally irrelevant to the thread. My response was in relation to the Climate Change denier's crap they are peddling out about nothing you do have an affect on climate change- NOT TRUE!

@schnauzerbeard well.im clearly on a lower tariff than you. Electric is 19pkwh
Standing charge 29p. Gas is 4.0p standing charge 28.8p
Average usage per year is 1087.4 Electric
4853 Gas.

I love the fact that of all the points i made, certain posters just want to quible about my Utility bills!

But when atmospheric CO2levels were estimated to be above 2000ppm the average sea temperature was also estimated to be about c12 degrees celsius higher and average land temperature c17 degrees celsius higher. I'm not sure that many current species would survive such conditions, especially if the aren't given time to evolve.

The lowest estimates for atmospheric CO2 are around 150ppm, which resulted in snowball earth, with glaciers and ice sheets covering half the planet.

But this largely irrelevant for two reasons.

1. For the past 800,000 years or so we know we've been between 180ppm - 250ppm. The likelihood is that has been the level for longer (maybe all the way back to the first himans) but we don't have ice core samples that old so we'll stick to the last 800,000 years. Everything that's evolved over that time, including human civilisation, has done so with the conditions that that level of CO2 brings.

We're now at 422ppm, almlst double the average level of the past 800,000 years at least. So yes, while the planet and life in general can survive in climates with much higher CO2 levels than we have now, we don't know that we can as we evolved when levels were at their lowest.

2. Even if we can survive with higher CO2 levels that's not real issue we're facing, which is the speed at which we are increasing atmospheric CO2.

We know were currently increasing the level of atmospheric CO2 by 2-4ppm / yr.

Even when the earth was young and volcanic activity was constant it's estimated that it took millions of years to get from somewhere like 200ppm to 2000pm. At current rates well achieve this in 600-800 years. That's not enough time for anything to adapt or evolve, especially when we have no idea how the planet will respond to such a rapid increase.

We know that increased CO2 causes warming, we know that we are increasing the level of CO2 in the atmosphere at an unprecedented and unnatural rate, we know that global mean surface temperatures are rising, and we can now observe that the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events are increasing

I'm sorry but it takes a special type of scepticism to know all that and come to the conclusion that we're not causing an issue.

Oh my goodness, this has happened to you too!?

I also had a co-worker, pregnant with her third kid, reprimanding me about some plastic wrapping of my lunch.
She was totally blind to her own actions, it was crazy.

I have no kids, don’t drive, don’t eat meat, don’t fly, and buy second hand where I can.

I do eat meat, but other than that, I’m the same. And she really thought I was the problem!

Are you suggesting the rising temperatures are compatible with human life? It is basic science Carbon dioxide is a heat trapping gas and absorbs and emits heat, human activity is responsible for the CO2 amplifying the Earth's greenhouse effect, how is life sustainable if the plants die, the food crops die? The extremes in weather brought about by man made climate change are going to destroy vegetation so there is no benefit at all(which is what you are alluding to).

We know that CO2 slows down global cooling, in its role as a so-called 'greenhouse gas' (radiative forcing agent) - that radiation (infrared) does eventually escape back to space. Greenhouse gases make Earth habitable. There is not a straightforward linear relationship between CO2 emissions and temperature - it has been shown that there is a lag between temperature changes and CO2 levels during the glacial periods which is most likely because atmospheric CO2 is being caused by temperature changes, rather than driving them. It is the case that warmer oceans are subject to degassing, whilst colder water absorbs more CO2 from the atmosphere. This provides an alternative explanation to the that presented by the climate alarmist narrative. It is, in my opinion, a far more convincing explanation of the relationship between atmospheric CO2 levels and temperature changes during the glacial periods (particularly as Antarctic ice cores have shown that CO2 rises have lagged temperature rises by about 800 years).

The lag you refer to does not negate the fact that CO2 leads to higher temperatures. It simply doesn't and it is not alarmist narrative it is the truth! This sideshow is just distracting from what has to be done.

But the degree of warming linked directly to CO2 has not been established scientifically. It simply has not! I stand with Patrick Moore (founder member of Greenpeace - but now completely disillusioned by the organisation's position)...the far greater threat to humans and life on Earth is presented by the agenda to reduce CO2 levels. What happens if we overshoot in our attempts to reduce levels. Remember, the long term natural state is for CO2 levels to be radically declining over the geological timescale and we were perilously close to those levels being incompatible with life...CO2 is not a pollutant at current or projected levels. We are not experiencing warming that is abnormal for an interglacial - whatever the scary propaganda would have you believe!

You are wrong on several counts. The most prominent is the statement regarding the speed of global warming. The earth is currently heating thousands of times faster than it would naturally.

https://m.xkcd.com/1732/

An explanation in graphic form

Computer models, whilst essential tools of climate science, have severe limitations. It is simply impossible to model all the variables of the current starting conditions to initialise subsequent simulations correctly. The danger is that the public don't tend to understand the huge levels of uncertainty - making it easy to succumb to and regurgitate overly-simplistic headlines of alarmist narratives. There is not the necessary resolution within the climatic models to discern with any accuracy the contribution of human influence to climate.
The graph that you linked to in your subsequent post is comically crude (both in its presentation-style and its content). What is a global average temperature? How is such an overarching value obtained even for current times, let alone over the past twenty thousand years. Regardless of accuracy, the graph you link to has to be combining modern temperature data gleaned from modern instruments with data from proxy temperature records. The latter will produce crude, smoothed results that, by their very nature, will not be capable of discerning the rates of temperature changes over decades (as plotted over the last few decades). It is worth noting that computer models' ability to accurately reflect past temperatures is sort of illusionary - in that it is achieved through 'tuning' model outcomes to accord with what is known - but this means tinkering with different variables until they get a match - thus errors can be built in to the values assigned that inevitably produce mistakes and wild differences in current and future simulations. The IPCC presents model results that are an average of outcomes that differ dramatically. There isn't even agreement with respect to the simulated current global average surface temperatures - these differ by around 3 degrees centigrade (which is, 300% more than the 20th century warming that they are supposed to be able to describe!). When model simulations are compared to actual temperature records, it is particularly troubling that they have been unable to simulate the actual temperature increases that were recorded globally on the ground between 1910 and 1940 - and they admit that they have no idea what is responsible for this failure within their models:
"It remains difficult to quantify the contribution to this warming from internal variability, natural forcing and anthropogenic forcing, due to forcing and response uncertainties and incomplete observational coverage." (IPCC. AR5 WGI, 887).
Thus, extrapolating from recent observed temperature increases may be confusing natural variability cycles (such as those that play out in El Nino Southern Oscillation events) with human influence - clearly as the current evidence stands, the models have not yet managed to disentangle the different forcing factors - and any headlines or pronouncements that state otherwise are not evidence-based. This is also seen, as acknowledged in the IPCC working group report (IPCC.AR5, 801) by the huge variability in model results for the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) - which simulated cycles ranging from 40 years to more than 100 years! Similar difficulties in reproducing variability were experienced when trying to accurately simulate multidecadal cycles in the Pacific (IPCC.AR5,9.5.3.6).
My overarching point is that the science is far from settled - and this is not being adequately reflected in the way that mainstream media and politicians are presenting the information. It is wrong that space is not being made for proper debate and discussion of the challenges and complexities - complex science should not be presented in such an absolutist way, with overly simplistic narratives. That is disingenuous and dangerous. I want to be part of a society that is capable of looking at complicated problems from every angle and does not try to distort the truth through shouting soundbites!

Of course the graph is comically simple. It's meant to be.

Nothing you have said challenges the core concepts here. Of course the models aren't perfect. It's a complex system, and no scientific model is perfect. However, you are fussing around with small problematic areas, when there is a startlingly good consensus from the relevant professional bodies.

Finally, worrying about overshooting on carbon emissions reduction? I think that's more than a bit optimistic!

There are plenty of eminent scientists who take issue with the idea that there is a scientific consensus with respect to the alarmist narrative Take a look at the work of Dr John Christy (a climate scientist who was actually involved in the original use of satellites as a tool for measuring global temperature - and is appalled by the divergence of the politics from the actual datasets - which he has had a significant role in producing). Dr Judith Curry is another scientist who springs to mind - and is able to communicate a clear overview of what has been going wrong with the mainstream narrative , as well as having an excellent grasp of the actual science - as she notes: there is no emergency..."...people who think that they can control the climate...it is just a pipe dream - even if we went to net zero, we would barely notice....the climate is going to do what the climate is going to do...." (see her recent interview - ).
Also, for a clear and concise overview of Dr John Christy's position -

Reading

You found two retired climate scientists, one from Georgia (US) the other from Alabama. You don't think that there might be socio-political factors at play here?

I note that neither of them really even want to refute the standard key concepts regarding climate change. I actually agree that the worst case scenarios are alarmist. They were true 10 years ago, perhaps, when we were on a trajectory to a 4 to 8 degree hotter world. That has changed. Those extreme outcomes are no longer projected, because our carbon emissions have changed.

However, the poorest people in the world are already feeling the effects of increased temperatures. We can make a big difference to a lot of people by limiting the rapidity of the change .