We're several years too late to stop it, and we still have half of our government (in the US) utterly denying the problem even exists.
I suggest looking up what people on the opposite side of the debate actually believe, rather than lumping them all together as "denying the problem even exists".C02 levels are rising (currently 0.04%, will be 0.05% by 2060) and cause a greenhouse effect. We don't know how strong this effect is, but we do know the effect is logarithmic (every additional unit of C02 causes less warming). Many predictions of knock-on effects of climate change are highly speculative (e.g., gulf stream shutdown) or products of distorted incentives (much more money is allocated for climate science research than for other environmental studies, incentivising researchers to exaggerate links between climate change and other environmental issues). Every indication is that we're facing changes which we can adapt to or mitigate with technology. What's also clear is that cutting emissions by more than 80% (as is often advocated) would cripple energy production, which would cripple industrial civilisation. We're talking people going back to living in tiny smoke-filled cottages (no AC or central heating), in small villages (no commuting), mostly working on farms (no diesel-powered farm equipment). Fossil fuels, nuclear and hydro power are currently the only viable options to keep modern civilisation running. Hopefully we eventually find an alternative, but it's insane to risk mass suicide to avoid a manageable change in the climate, on the utopian hope that wind/solar will somehow leap forwards in efficiency. Anyway, that's what I (and many other rational anti-environmentalists) believe. there's a whole segment of the population that still believes in fairy tales spun by the oil and gas industry.
If you're implying people are in hock to propaganda, the amount spent by the fossil fuel industry on advocacy is dwarfed by the amount spent on pro-environmentalist advocacy by governments, liberal foundations and the big environmentalist NGOs.http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor/2014/01/02/dark-mone... The human mind is just terrible at grasping problems on the scale and timeline of global climate change, and it's plausible that it'll be the end of life as we know it in another few decades.
Nice combination of speculation about why people disagree (their minds just can't "grasp" it) followed by ungrounded catastrophism. Even the IPCC thinks we're facing a sea level rise of between 20 and 60 centimetres by 2100. That is not "the end of life as we know it". |
You don't know this. You are convinced of it, and it is wrong.
See https://www.skepticalscience.com/saturated-co2-effect.htm for a debunking of this particular claim.
Fossil fuels, nuclear and hydro power are currently the only viable options to keep modern civilisation running. Hopefully we eventually find an alternative, but it's insane to risk mass suicide to avoid a manageable change in the climate, on the utopian hope that wind/solar will somehow leap forwards in efficiency.
And you're out of date. Real world costs per megawatt delivered is now lower for solar than coal. There is a lot of work to do to replace existing infrastructure, and this is not appropriate for all environments, but solar is definitely a cost-effective part of our future.
That is not "the end of life as we know it".
OK, that phrase is exaggerated. But, for example, a mass extinction of coral and shellfish due to ocean acidification is going to fundamentally change our oceans by a whole lot with who knows what long term fallout. And while we can mitigate warming effects with aerosols, we don't have a way to mitigate CO2+H2O = H2CO3 (carbonic acid).