Yet another climate change thread

[athon]

I know one thing this forum doesn't need is yet another thread on global warming. Yet this is an opinion I've been touting for some time, and I feel I don't want to derail any other thread by putting it out there.

Firstly, I am of the opinion -- based on what I've read -- that human behaviour has contributed to climate change. What is in dispute is the extent to which this has occured and the consequences of it. None-the-less, I feel (again based on what I've read) that the impact is sizeable enough to negatively impact a relatively large number of people within a relatively short amount of time. The scale of each of these statements I am not prepared to define precisely, basically because at this level I don't consider myself to be informed well enough.

Secondly, there are concerned efforts by many authorities to try to address what are perceived as some of the key contributions to anthropogenic global warming, namely carbon pollution.

I have no problem with this, as I cannot see the sustainability of carbon based industry in the long run. I also cannot see the sustainability of population increase in the long run, and wonder which future governments are ever going to make the difficult economic decision to do something about either issue.

Now the real concern I have is that so much focus is being placed on how to reduce the impact of climate change, with little focus being given to how to react to it. It seems that carbon fuels will not be eliminated for some time yet, that populations will increase while current economies encourage it, and that changes to our climate and our environment will occur in spite of the best efforts to limit our impact. As pessimistic as all this sounds, why is so little being done to create more flexible infrastructures for when changes do occur?

The one certainty is that with time, the climate will change. Australia's increasing reliance on water in a climate where drought is becoming more frequent is a perfect example. The Queensland government is trying to impliment water recycling, yet instead of just doing it, they are putting up a referendum. In other words, if (like happened in the Queensland town of Toowoomba) it is rejected, then alternative and less effective schemes will have to be applied, to the detriment of our population.

Climates change. No argument there. So why don't we acknowledge that and create schemes that are sustainable and flexible?

Athon
(climbs down from soap box and dusts it off)

 

[Schneibster]

I think part of the problem you face is that people who want to deny it do so because they want to avoid discussing what must be done in the first place. The measures are relatively obvious; the problem is, most people don't want to do those things, and so they try to justify not doing them. This is true psychological denial.

As a result of this, I think that the bulk of the responses on this thread will be from committed environmentalists, who may or may not acknowledge the (to me fairly obvious) potential economic (and therefore potentially life-threatening, to say nothing of elitist and thus perhaps equally denialist, though on a different issue) consequences. It is very much easier for the wealthiest among us to make changes that will make a difference than for the poorest to do so, and very much less effective merely because there are many more poor than there are wealthy. Those who are not very committed to environmentalism will simply refuse to respond, because they do not grant your premise that there is something wrong and it should be fixed.

I will say this: there are no easy answers. Someone's gonna get screwed, and unless we are very careful, to very little in the way of actual mitigation of the real problem. Tell me, are you prepared to go tell a billion people living in China, whose government possesses not only one of the most effective economies in the world, but also nuclear weapons, that they cannot have cars, or cannot burn charcoal to heat their homes and cook their food? Because that's what it's going to come down to, and I'm sure you know their response without me being misinterpretably insulting. Pick any other group, like US citizens who are driving lots of cars and using lots of electricity, or Europeans, or whomever, and you're going to get pretty much the same result, unless they're rich- and if they're rich, they can't make enough difference.

Let me tell you what has to happen: it has to hurt bad enough, or enough people have to be scared of how bad it's going to hurt, that they demand that their governments do something, and they're going to have to do so consistently enough that the governments in question actually do it rather than just do whatever seems most convenient to convince everyone they're "doing something" without actually making much difference, because they don't want people to be hurt because then they'll vote them out. The question is, when that time comes, will it be soon enough? I think the answer is "yes," but I'm not convinced that a truly enormous number of people aren't going to be very badly affected before anything we can start to do by that time is going to start making any difference. I think this one might be bad, although I stop well short of some of the Malthusian predictions of the most extreme sort.

And I always remember the part at the end of Three Days of the Condor:
Higgins: No. It's simple economics. Today it's oil, right? In ten or fifteen years, food. Plutonium. And maybe even sooner. Now, what do you think the people are gonna want us to do then?
Turner: Ask them.
Higgins: Not now — then! Ask 'em when they're running out. Ask 'em when there's no heat in their homes and they're cold. Ask 'em when their engines stop. Ask 'em when people who have never known hunger start going hungry. You wanna know something? They won't want us to ask 'em. They'll just want us to get it for 'em!

Makes my friggin' blood run cold, man.