Is anyone else reading about climate change?

[TwigletsMakeMeViolent]

It's getting more and more worrying. Even if we stopped drilling today we're still in line for catastrophic climate change.

Monbiot today.

This follows a report last week from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography showing that carbon will never again drop below 400ppm.

Recycling and composting and taking fewer flights isn't going to help, really. Only our politicians can do this by drastic action. And that doesn't look likely.

Thoughts? And please, it would be great if this didn't descend into a climate change denial thread.

The male/female/young people comparisons are interesting but I'm not sure they're borne out by statistics. This study from last year, for example, shows younger people, especially young women care more about serious climate change - and poorer people, too.

That is the US though, not sure about the UK or elsewhere.

I am also scratching my head that this isn't a bigger topic of conversation on MN. The time has passed when we can avoid the consequences of climate change. The future's going to be different. Whether it'll be as scary as Monbiot and co point out, I don't know. But it's going to be different nonetheless. I mean - it's already changing. Forest fires, climate refugees, drought - in the country where I live (in South America) there are certain parts that haven't had rain for four years. This is unprecedented in the country's history. The indigenous population there is suffering hugely. This is going to be the new normal in many parts of the world.

You're welcome to start your own thread if you like, amicissimma.

And I very much doubt this thread will influence any government policy, so you can rest easy.

Amicissimma the vast majority of the world's policy-makers agree that climate change is real, manmade and caused by carbon emissions. So there's no need for further debate on this thread.

Twiglets - you mean you're NOT actually on the phone, right now, to Greg Clark MP? What are you doing, woman?!

Sadly, I don't have his number shove. I'm sure if I did get him on the phone though he'd be all ears.

Here's his constituency office number Twiglets: 01892 519 854

Ha, thanks Grumpy!

'It didn't always used to be so partisan - Thatcher was very concerned about climate change, for instance'

pennycarbonara, a good article on Thatcher and climate change showing how she first believed her experts and believed in climate change and later became a climate change sceptic

"Was Margaret Thatcher the first climate sceptic?"

www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/7823477/Was-Margaret-Thatcher-the-first-climate-sceptic.html

Oh man, here we go. Claig, with the greatest respect, please start your own thread if you'd like to debate climate change skepticism. PLEASE. I have seen you on other threads and you manage to derail every single one.

I am not joining in. I agree with you that climate change is a very serious problem. But I think it is useful to correct the Thatcher view in case lurkers don't know about it.

Bye!

Twiglets, interesting Pew survey of different countries there. I'd only seen these US ones, www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/06/16/ideological-divide-over-global-warming-as-wide-as-ever/
which show how closely it's become associated with party affiliation, over there in particular.

Agreed that population is part of the problem - it's people who are consuming all these resources and leading to emissions, and crowding out the endangered species. And it's too often forgotten when that comes up that a Westerner has much higher consumption than someone in a developing country - it's not only about human numbers.

Population growth has such momentum currently that almost nothing is likely to change it in the next few decades.
www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/10/27/stop-pretending-we-can-fix-the-environment-by-curbing-population-growth/
The projections are interesting and make sense, though I'm not keen on some of the wording in the article. It's too similar to the attitude that we shouldn't do anything about CO2 emissions until the rest of the world does, contributing to the tragedy of the commons and continuing to be part of the problem rather than the solution. They don't appear to have run a model that included consequences of larger famines as a result of destertification and resource wars, but maybe the lowest-growth one is similar.

Birth rates are stabilising and dropping just about everywhere (thanks, increased education). But just like C02 emissions, it's not fast enough. But there's not much you can do about birth rates - other than continue to educate.

And yes, we in the western world use waaay above our allocation of resources. It's pretty shocking and shows how being greedy is now completely normalised. With the meat example, my parents wouldn't have dreamed of having meat with every meal as kids/young adults. Meat was a treat. Now it's so cheap to eat meat, people eat it with every meal. It's normal - but it really shouldn't be.

I think Millennials get a bad rap - spoilt, obsessed with consumerism etc. I don't think that's the case, I know a lot of clued-up young people (I know that's anecdata but still!) who are bloody terrified about climate change and its implications.

I think my generation (am late 30s) will be fine - ish. But I'm very worried about my children's generation, facing war and global shortages.

I also have a lot of hope that technology will help. For example: artificially grown meat is a very exciting development. Cheap to produce, low carbon footprint - could be a world-changing solution. People will turn their noses up at it at first, but it will quickly become as normal (and far less disgusting) than mechanically reclaimed meat.

I've been following climate change news on and off for the last 20 odd years and governments seem to talk a lot about it but never come up with any particularly ambitious targets.

I don't see threads about environmental issues or loss of wildlife on Mumsnet very often. I don't think the environment should be seen as a side issue that only matters to people with no other pressing concerns. I think climate change is a difficult one because it can seem intangible, or a problem that is so large and long-term it can be hard for individuals they can have any effect. Then people don't like to be made to feel guilty or nagged not to fly so much, not to upgrade their gadgets every five minutes etc.

On a recent thread about large families, there was also a lot of fatalism, i.e. the humans are going to die out at some point anyway, what does it matter if it is a few thousand years earlier or later. And all the previous climate change threads I've read have descended into long posts denying it is even a problem in the first place.

The uncomfortable truth of 'two will do ' is the one people really dont like.

I think people are tough on Millennials for one simple reason: they don't want to face the guilt attendant on being an earlier, more privileged generation who are leaving a pretty polluted legacy for others to clear up. They also want to believe that they only succeeded because they worked hard. Therefore, their ego drives them to say that young people are struggling not because of changing historical conditions but because they're just not a match for previous generations.

We have a real problem with entitlement - at the heart of the climate issue there is this unbridled and utter selfishness of people who don't see any problem with capitalism because it works for them, right now. It's positively genocidal - they don't give a shit that people elsewhere are suffering, they don't care that we are witnessing the start of something approaching a holocaust. They are morally hollow. As long as they can keep driving their Land Rover round the city, they don't care.

Its easy to blame politicians but its the people who are refusing to accept changing their lifestyles significantly.

Nuclear is the answer but everyone complains its expensive, when its not compared to other zero carbon fuels. Then we also need gas, the next best low carbon fuel. Ironically just last week Labour banned fracking meaning if they got into power we will have to import it from the other side of the world. How is that good for the environment?

Fracking is terrible for the environment and needs to be banned. See the links upthread.

The Hinckley project is expensive. There appear to be cheaper and safer ways of doing nuclear power now, but the government agreed to this one.

I think a lot of people aren't aware of the kind of entitlement you mean, shovetheholly; they are in a world where it's normal to replace your iPhone every year or two, and opinions saying otherwise are marginal to them. People see and hear drastically different opinions these days because of their reading and friend choices online.

In a way, it's so strange that resource use, consumer choice and the amount of stuff individuals buy and own has increased so much since environmental issues first started to get serious notice in the late 80s. Massive dissonance there.

Some people could manage fine with less, but there are also a fair number of people around who wouldn't have survived long in the past - not just the ones with serious illnesses and disabilities, but those who would have "failed to thrive" as children in an environment with less choice and abundance (especially of food) because they were temperamentally very sensitive or fussy.

penny - I think it's the difference between necessities and things that are 'nice to have' isn't it? No-one is talking about kids going without food on this thread (though important to recognise that this is increasingly a very real problem in areas of food bank Britain). The burden of the changes very much needs to fall on the wealthy.

We're talking about a highly rich, entitled middle class driving slightly smaller, more fuel efficient cars rather than gas guzzlers, not living with 2 people to a 10 bed house for no reason, occasionally walking or cycling rather than driving for those who are able to do so, eating red meat a bit more infrequently etc. And building pressure on governments to make the difficult decisions so that the kids being born now can have some kind of a future.