Climate change.....it's too late to stop it, isn't it ?

[Banquosfeast]

How long have we been hearing the message to reduce CO2 emissions ? At least 30 years, (Mrs Thatcher the first UK politician to raise with subject, with her 1989 UN speech). Climate change has already happened, as is clear from weather reports from around the world. The rise in global temperatures that have already occurred, irreversible, and will get worse.

Yet, still nobody changes their personal behaviour....at all !

Just today I've witnessed, 1) someone sitting in their car, drinking a coffee.....engine running. 2) twenty people leaving a yoga class, and the room empty.....not one thinks to turn off the lights. 3) at the gym, air-conditioning blasting away....with the windows open ! 4) on the motorway, well it's the Wacky Races out there - nobody driving, as it they are trying to limit their vehicle's CO2 emissions; quite the opposite in fact.

Let's be honest, it's too late.

@Yeahreally

The UK’s per capita CO2 emissions are at 1850 levels.

The UK’s total annual CO2 emissions are at 1900 levels.

We have cut the total CO2 we produced from its record high in the 1990s by HALF despite the population increasing by 13 million people!

(This is both when measured by production or consumption. Consumption measures add in the CO2 emissions of all the tat we import from China and elsewhere and then subtract the CO2 emissions of what we export.)

Do you seriously think this just happened through no action whatsoever? You think my generation which came of age in the 90s has done fuck all? Give over.

Id urge people to take a look at my positive action thread.

There's so much we can all do, some it relatively insignificant, some of it dramatic, but it will take both. Deflecting responsibility to others is lazy.

@ReleasetheCrackHen "Excuse me, but how can you parrot “decades of inaction” and say that methods used thus far have been “largely unsuccessful” with a straight face?"

Answer: very easily. It's a consensus opinion held by the scientific mainstream, the current head of the UN, the former head of the Bank of England, the list goes on. Maybe they are all eco-fascists too. Put it another way: if the actions of the last few decades had been successful, why exactly are we seeing temperature records being broken year on year?

What I don't get is why are things like coffee pods allowed to be made if it's a real issue?

Those in power/the power structures, there's the power in there to halt production of things like that or just stipulate that they must be biodegradable.

@Daftasabroom completely agree on JSO, XR and The Guardian

In your more informed view what is your take on the Gulf Stream changing weather in U.K. significantly?

I agree. This is something that needs all parts of society working together.

Responsibility is on all nations, governments, businesses, communities and individuals.

It’s not the consensus opinion at all. Have you not even looked at the actual reports and data?

We are seeing record temperatures because we are suffering the impact of the CO2 released 50yrs ago. It’s scientific fact there is a lag time when it comes to the impact of our human activity. Why do you think that the little ice age lasted well beyond the start of the Industrial Revolution? Because you can’t switch off climate change like a light bulb.

We are very much in the 11th hour but we have choices we can make. I haven’t lost all hope. At least maybe now people will understand how critical the situation is.

@ReleasetheCrackHen - interesting. Can you link me to the sources that prove that current temperature rises have nothing at all to do with emissions in the last 40 odd years?

And sadly, our efforts are a drop in the global ocean. The fact global emissions haven’t gone down means two things. More heat is coming and the problem isn’t the U.K. (us). We are doing our bit. Especially when you look at the technology and funding we have literally given away to other countries to try and get them to follow suit.

All we can do is persevere and get to net zero as soon as we can.

“A simplified mathematical model of carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations and temperature found a "lag time" between human intervention and an actual decrease in CO2 levels. This lag time has ramifications for intervention strategies meant to avoid climate tipping points and potentially catastrophic temperature increases.
"Broadly speaking, this is a simple energy balance model that allows you to analyze various emission reduction and carbon capture strategies and their effect on climate over time," says Mohammad Farazmand, assistant professor of mathematics at North Carolina State University and corresponding author of the work. "Fully resolved climate models are too complex to do this sort of analytic work on."
To that end, the researchers used the mean surface temperature and CO2 concentration for Earth as a whole when creating the model, rather than attempting to account for variations in temperature and humidity across the globe. The model, a system of stochastic delay differential equations, takes into account carbon emission and capture rates. It has two main components. First, it compares CO2 sources and CO2 sinks, either naturally occurring or humanmade, to indicate the rate at which CO2 is being pumped into the atmosphere. Second, it accounts for solar radiation entering the atmosphere which is either trapped there or reflected back. Once these data were put into the model, the researchers were able to look at what happens as CO2emission rates fall over different timescales.

"Our model shows that, even when the emission rates are reduced, the CO2 concentration exhibits a transient growth which may still instigate a climate tipping point,"Farazmand says. Transient growth is a result of delayed feedback.

If CO2 is being pumped into the system, there will still be a delay between decreases in the amount entering the system and a decrease in overall CO2 levels. In fact, the delay can create a feedback loop that will increase the CO2 concentration for a short period, which could still push a system over a climate tipping point and into catastrophe.

"Think of transient growth like overcoming inertia," Farazmand says. "It's like trying to slow down an enormous train -- you can't stop it all at once, there will be a delay between applying the brakes and the train coming to a halt. And in talking about CO2levels, this could have catastrophic consequences."

The model analyzed what would happen if CO2 emissions decreased five, 10, 15, and 20 years out, and found that after the 10-year mark, transient growth would still push the climate into a tipping point, resulting in a temperature increase of 6 degrees C within 50 years.
"The model used 478 ppm of CO2 as the tipping point," Farazmand says. "This value is contested, but the numerical value isn't as important as the phenomenon of the transient growth and feedback loop."
The researchers hope that their model will be useful in understanding CO2 concentrations more broadly.
"It is important to understand that yes, at a certain level you will have catastrophic change, but even if you start working on it now you will still have increases," Farazmand says. "While this model is simpler than existing climate models, we hope it can be used as a starting point for or applied to existing models to get a better picture of what is happening with CO2 concentrations."
The work appears in Proceedings of the Royal Society A and was supported by the National Science Foundation (grant DMS-1745654). Alexander Mendez, a Ph.D. student at NC State, is coauthor.”

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/12/211215132705.htm

as for looking at UK CO2 emissions all we have is export them to other countries.
what might tip things is the fact that I’m some places you already can’t get insurance as companies know the risk is too great ie parts of California/Florida. Good prices are likely to stay high as lots of crops in lots of places will wither due to the heat. It is foolish for the 0.1% think they can escape as bunkers don’t last for ever and the rich expect others will service them rather than do the work themselves

@SunnyEgg I work in fairly academic engineering research but have a STEM degree and far too much experience (I'd love to be 26 again!). I used to think I understood it reasonably well, but what we thought we knew 25 years ago was only scratching the surface. The physics hasn't changed at all, what has changed is our understanding of a deeply complex system for which there is very little precedent.

To my mind what seems to be happening is that weather is becoming more stable and more extreme at the same time. So higher heat or energy intensity over either land or sea sucks in air from around it. So we get wet and damp from the Atlantic while the Med gets baked. This is linked into the North Atlantic Drift and the Jet Stream and El Nino.

In the UK we used to get generally unsettled weather when we'd have a week of this or a few days of that. Now we get a month of something or weeks of that. More stable, but more extreme.

You can't prove a negative.

To be fair, this where individual choices come into play

it can’t be stopped. The climate has changed for eternity. How does one explain the ice age, or that there were deserts and rainforests in places long ago where there aren’t now (geology demonstrates this).

also, if you believe human activity is to blame, even if we act local, China and India are burning so much coal that we’d be better not to bankrupt the UK and put our money there to find alternative energy. Germany are burning coal too after they stopped their nuclear plants (the lowest carbon most reliable power)

so don’t sweat it, there’s nothing you can do apart from vote and act against policies which just cost us in the UK more.

@ReleasetheCrackHen conversely, NASA suggests it's less than a decade, not 50 years:
https://climate.nasa.gov/faq/16/is-it-too-late-to-prevent-climate-change/

"Humans have caused major climate changes to happen already, and we have set in motion more changes still. However, if we stopped emitting greenhouse gases today, the rise in global temperatures would begin to flatten within a few years. Temperatures would then plateau but remain well-elevated for many, many centuries. There is a time lag between what we do and when we feel it, but that lag is less than a decade."

Unsurprisingly, I also find this gives me a little more cause for optimism in terms of what could be achieved if we step up.

The drsmatic climate change events you refer to in the past a) precipitated mass extinctions (I.e. it's not something we should be relaxed about in any way) and b) we're not man made.

"Also, if you believe climate change is man made...". Perhaps it was an unfortunate turn of phrase but let's be clear: the mainstream scientific consensus is that it is man made. I don't think it helps the conversation to leave any room for doubt on this.

"so don’t sweat it, there’s nothing you can do apart from vote and act against policies which just cost us in the UK more." This is actually one point where my views overlap with the likes of @Daftasabroom - we most certainly can do something (even if we're not completely aligned as to what that is).

As the current custodians of this planet we have a duty to our kids, grandkids to not give up.

Again, get involved at whatever level you can.

The climate has changed for eternity. How does one explain the ice age, or that there were deserts and rainforests in places long ago where there aren’t now (geology demonstrates this).

Irrelevant. Previous major changes may have been natural, and caused by various complex interactions, but so what? This one is man-made.

And whether natural or otherwise, climate changes bring massive changes in liveability, sea level, animal and plant life, and landmasses. They cause mass extinctions, and we should be very worried.

I’d seen this too @Yeahreally and read that temperatures will/would plateau relatively quickly once we reach net zero globally. I think that’s predicted to be around 2060, but I could be wrong. Like you, though, knowing that we could stop things getting worse quite quickly, even if reversing them isn’t quick (or possible?), gives me some form of hope.

Can't remember the professor but he said we wouldn't win the battle because the public won't change their ways and will think of numerous reasons as to why they shouldn't.

There's a depressing logic to that view point (and it chimes with the "it's too late, we're already screwed" comments from others, which frankly, isn't an unreasonable response given the scale of the challenge).

My counter to this: a life led believing that all of these horrors are unstoppable is a pretty miserable one. In fact, it's a life spent trying to duck and dive from a despair which will get you or any other reasonable person at some point and will floor you.
It's a cliché but there's no happiness if there's no hope.
And one benefit of getting involved in a collective that plays some part in trying to bring collective change (as opposed to individual token efforts) is that it gives you hope.
So unless you're a denier of CC (or don't think the effects will be that bad), get involved. You might prefer a group that is on the mild/moderate flank (as opposed to thd more disruptive-but-non-violent approach of XR or JSO) but find something, get involved and give yourself cause to hope. www.climatenetwork.org is a good place to see what's out there.

The man-made vs natural distinction is strange and alien to me.

We are part of nature. We are not something outside of it.

Yep.

If I had children i would be panicked about their future. It's going to become a fight for essentials like air & water.

The pandemic and heat waves are merely a taste of what's to come.

We deserve it but I feel bad for the many other beautiful species that we're killing by the day.

Agree.

It's happening right before our eyes.