To ask for a head count as to how many mumsnetters don’t believe that climate change is caused by human activity?

[workingtowards]

There was a thread on MN many years ago, when a good proportion thought climate change was just weather/natural, so it would be interesting to know if views have changed.

YANBU: Yes human activity is causing climate change
YABU: No climate change is natural and there’s nothing we can do about it

Please tell me the value of Jupiter's moons. I would be interested, except that we have already deduced they are uninhabitable for our species or actually, any mammalian species.

That's an overly simplistic view

Yes it is AIBU, but your choices were not worded as well as they could be in my opinion. I haven’t voted because neither choice is sufficiently accurate.

@Theunamedcat , to whom was your comment directed?

Saturn is perfectly majestic with no culture

I would disagree but you are free to make that judgement!

Well, this has gone weird now

Thank god for this post. I was losing the will...

I think it's a mix of both. The earth is having a warming period (and will have a cooling period again in future). It's what the earth does and always has done. I also believe that human activity is making the warming happen faster and to a greater degree.

"Do you believe in climate change" is such a worthless faith-test. The only interesting question should be what should we do about it, whether anthropogenic or natural - and on that question intelligent minds may differ.

Another nugget from me:

China’s emissions often come up in these discussions but when you think about it a chunk of their emissions are really our emissions because they’re doing our manufacturing for us.

We “export” a huge chunk of our emissions to China, through them making stuff for us, because we hardly make anything, then blame China for their emissions and claim that ours are lower than they actually are.

Ditto for places like Bangladesh where our cheap clothes are often made.

Our territorial (within our borders) emissions are lower than the emissions we are responsible for because of our demand for stuff.

Those emissions get blamed on the country of manufacture, but really the responsibility lies with the country with the demand.

Yet another "both". The planet's still coming out of an ice age. But humans started evolving during a period of repeated glaciations: it's never been really hot during our species' time and we didn't evolve to deal with the conditions of a 'greenhouse' epoch.

Therefore it's pretty stupid of us to speed up the warming process, as we are.

The earth is 4.5 billion years old and the climate has been changing for all of that time. People have been around for only a fraction of those years.
It therefore doesn't add up to attribute climate change solely to human activity.
However, does human activity impact the environment?
Of course it does.
The debate needed is how much do we need to mitigate this, and how best to do it.
I suggest the knee jerk reactions that negatively impact the poorer in society most - green levies, ULEZ and the like are not socially fair or acceptable solutions.

CO2 emissions are measured both ways.
There is the production based emissions which measures all the emissions we do within our borders including whatever we manufacture to sell & export to other countries is counted against us.
Then there is the consumption based emissions which measures all the emissions we do within our borders but then adds the emissions of everything we import, while subtracting the emissions of everything we export (those are added to the countries importing our products)

UK production based emissions are 327m or 0.9% of global emissions
UK consumption based emissions are 465m 1.3%of global emissions

China production based emissions are 10.96bn tonnes or 29.5% of global emissions
China consumption based emissions are 10.03bn tonnes or 27% of global emissions

So it is very clear that 92% of China’s emissions are on energy and products they consume.

a chunk of their emissions are really our emissions because they’re doing our manufacturing for us
This chunk is 8% of their emissions for everything they manufacture and export to everyone else in the world- not just us.

(all figures are 2020 figures because the website doesn’t have any later figures for consumption based CO2 emissions)

We “export” a huge chunk of our emissions to China

The emissions we “export” to everyone else, not just China, are 30% of our total consumption based emissions, which accounts for 0.4% of global emissions.

I’ve seen some polls on and most feel like we’re not doing enough

Oth holidays are popular, and consumption generally

So maybe people feel like it’s something someone else solves or pays for

We’re at the abstract it’s not going to hurt (financially) stage.

Free to read in the FT today.

www.ft.com/content/8e05cf9f-9fed-4257-adbb-5df062e28af1

Sorry, it took me to a pay wall. Can you briefly summarise what was in the article?

Have you done many things such as stop flying, upgrade to heat pump, no car or EV etc

Not calling you out but you obviously care. Does it translate to your life as well? What type of stuff have you embraced

Just for informational purposes as China is so much more populous than the U.K., that the usual fairest way to measure how a country is doing with CO2 measures is to look at CO2 per capita. Unfortunately, this website divides total annual CO2 by total population. To adjust for consumption based, we have to reduce China’s by 8% and increase ours by 30%

8 x 0.92= 7.36t per capita China consumption
5.2 x 1.3= 6.76t per capita U.K. consumption

So U.K. and China- we still consume less per person. Another issue is that while we are actively cutting, China is on an upward trend. Even after you reduce the chunk of their emissions used on items they manufacture for the rest of the world, it’s clear their own consumption means each person in China consumes more than each person in the U.K.

Following on, so looking at per capita China vs U.K., China looks like a baddie don’t they? But they really aren’t once you add in a few real CO2 baddies.

This.

And then when you add in the super baddies, well China is practically just like us!

Countries have a responsibility for their cumulative historical global emissions that got us to this point.

The US is responsible for 20.3% of historical territorial emissions. China is second, with 11.4%,followed by Russia 6.9%, Brazil 4.5%,and Indonesia 4.1%, Germany is sixth on 3.5%, India 7th on 3.4%, and the U.K. is the 8th largest cumulative CO2 emitter globally with 3%.

The UK's isn't to do with forest fires or deforestation. It's primarily fossil fuel reliance.

And it doesn't count the emissions outsourcing we did throughout colonialism. (For example, in India.)

Or flights.

And then there's per capita.

The U.K. is a relatively small country with a relatively small population but 7th in the world for cumulative territorial emissions is punching well above our weight.

Both are true in part but human behavior is definitely causing issues at a faster and more problematic rate. But I do also think it's big companies that cause the biggest issues compared to individual people.