Reply to post: Re: And this is why it's always a bad idea...

Re: And this is why it's always a bad idea...

My concern is the zealoutry around climate change and the shouting down of ANY alternative hypothesis, the ostracising of any other views rather than rational discussion, whipping up mobs committing vandalism etc who hear carbon and think "death and apocalypse", who think if we miss 1.5C that suddenly everything and everyone on the planet drops dead right after,the rains will stop, the oceans will boil, every tree will burst into flames, crops will all fail en masse, that the seas will shoot up 20 metres overnight, that essentially it will be biblically apocalyptic and anyone who questions anything is tantamount to a murderer or a nazi.

Worse you have a growing clamour for highly experimental and incredibly risky climate engineering schemes, when even climatologists admit our knowledge of the way the climate functions is far from perfect and that there are vast gaps in our knowledge and that we are learning new things constantly.

Yes climate change isn't a good thing (and thats puttting it mildly), my concern though is "the road to hell is paved with good intentions" that we try and "cool" the climate and chuck the planet into an ice age or worse change weather patterns that make matters worse not better.

I'm also not keen on "per capita" emissions, seems a nice way to justify China and India belching out vast quantities of pollution and then using their massive population numbers to make it seem ok, How would the UK's per capita numbers look if the poorest in society still had 11+ children families (like my great grandparents did?) - i.e. those without a car, that can't afford a holiday, that keep the heating turned right down even in the coldest weather as they can't afford to run it due to various levies imposed, that buy secondhand and clothes etc get handed down sometimes through multiple families. I'd wager our per capita emissions would be a lot closer to India due to the sheer volume of people diluting the "unavoidables" like electricity generation, transport etc

IF we are going to cut emissions and stabilise our CO2 concentrations, then it has to cut across ALL countries at once, otherwise your into diminishing returns, you'd think britain emitted 40% of world emissions the way some talk, when the figure is closer to 1% and dropping (albeit not helped by greenwashing like biomass and wood burning, both of which never close the carbon circle)

However I don't see their being an agreement about this, I think we need to plan to mitigate the worst - flood controls, water diversion, dykes and dams, building new settlements on higher ground, planning for the extreme worst case and relocate the most low lying settlements / populations over time.

Lastly I really hate the way in which people (inc the BBC) greenwash electric cars, TopGear magazine even claimed ALL the rare earths etc are now "sustainably sourced" for electric vehicles, no they aren't, as recently as last year one of the major rare earth metal brokers could not guarantee the integrity of their supply chains, could not be sure that conflict mined materials such as those from Democratic republic of Congo were not being bought. the DRC where children and others are forced to mine rare earth metals at the barrel of a gun, where fragile ecology is being destroyed by militias minng to further fund the conflict and all so people in the west can claim moral superiority as they hop into their Tesla X/Y/3, Nissan Leaf, Renault Zoe, VW E-golf etc etc etc.....and then have the audacity to deflect about how they are "doing their bit for the climate" and "it'll be leftovers from copper mining in the 1920s, no one is illegally mining there, govts wouldn't allow it" - it is happening, its just the UK media are either too lazy or too committed to the "green" vehicle revolution to report on it