[Homunculiheaded]

It's too bad that reality doesn't really care if you have clever accounting tricks to show that "things aren't really as bad as they look!"

The only number that matters at all is global green house gas emissions. We need to get that to zero, and it has continued to go up.

Imagine you have a drinking problem and your doctor tells you you need to stop drinking alcohol or you will suffer liver failure. You can argue all day about what percentage of your drinks are alcoholic. "Doctor, I drink 3 cans of coke and only 12 G&Ts now, not 1 can of coke and 24 beers like I used to, I went from 4% of my drinks being non-alcoholic to 20%!" If your daily total alcohol consumed keep rising you have a problem.

That's the situation we're in with co2 emissions. There are many clever ways to make it look like everything is fine, but reality doesn't care. If our global CO2 emissions continue to rise we have absolutely no hope.

[akshatrathi]

Totally right that what matters is greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Tackling them, however, is going to take all our muscles. Many climate deniers have used the 80% of primary energy from fossil fuel figure as a way to claim it's too hard to do anything about the problem or to say there's been little progress. That's misleading and I wrote the article to explain to correct that narrative.

[wnevets]

>That's misleading and I wrote the article to explain to correct that narrative.

There is your first mistake, you can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves in to. There are literally people denying covid is real/serious while they or their love ones drown in their fluids.

[thinkharderdev]

I don't think this is a useful way to think about it:

1. You don't need to convince literally everyone. There are still some people who believe the Earth is flat and probably always will be, but it is not super-relevant to collective actions because they are a tiny minority

2. People do in fact change their minds on things. It usually just happens on larger time scales so while one article isn't moving the needle, the accretion of many articles and arguments can change population-wide beliefs.

3. The population of people with an opinion on any given topic is not static. Even if any individual never changes their mind, the composition of the population can change if new people are forming opinions in one way more often. Science progresses one funeral at a time and all that....

[wnevets]

The harsh reality is a facebook "meme" about how climate change is a hoax created by "globalist" to take away your rights is way more effective than a nuance article from the "lamestream" media trying to explain the energy efficiency of coal power plants.

If the goal is to convert science deniers or correct their disinformation this was a complete and utter failure.

[lettergram]

It’s funny, I’m not a claimant change denier, but I don’t view emissions as a problem. An insanely large portion of the CO2 is simply us and our livestock breathing. There’s also volcanos, etc.

I’m a lot more worried about chemicals outside of CO2. Such as lead or pesticides. CO2 fluctuates massively throughout the year. Presumably the world can much more quickly (due to vegetation) remove CO2 compared to those other chemicals. CO2 is also far less damaging to the body.

Not saying it’s not important, just I think we’d be better off focusing on issues such as pesticide contamination

[Shacklet0n]

Others haven't already pointed out that you're mistaken regarding "an insanely large portion of the CO2 is simply us and our livestock breathing." But also, consider this:

The carbon in the CO2 that you breath out comes from the carbon that you consume. That carbon - by virtue of its state - is part of an equilibrium carbon cycle that makes our planet habitable. I.e. the apple tree consumed CO2 from the atmosphere to create the apple that you ate, and you returned back to the atmosphere the carbon that the tree previously consumed.

Now consider the carbon that has been isolated from the cycle over billions of years as the planet became habitable to creatures such as ourselves and our non-human friends. That carbon is in the form of coal, oil, etc. If we leave that stuff in the ground we retain the current carbon equilibrium. If we burn it, we change the equilibrium by taking sequestered carbon from the ground that was "locked away" and add it to the atmospheric carbon cycle.

[layla5alive]

"I'm not a climate change denier but let me just deny all the science that CO2 is meaningfully contributing to climate change"

What exactly do you think the definition of a "climate change denier" is?

The important part isn't recognizing that climate change exists. The important part is recognizing why and what needs to be done about it.

You're misinformed about the science on this one...

[White_Wolf]

What exactly do you think the definition of a "climate change denier" is? - It's someone that doesn't think Earth's climate is changing. It's NOT someone that doesn't think CO2/cows/etc actually has a role in it.

Climate is indeed changing. What he's trying to argue is the role of CO2 in all of it.

100% right about this:"The important part is recognizing why".

So far no raw data has been made fully available to see see what, how, when and why. At least I was not able to find the data those graphs that you keep popping up are based on. I also don't remember seeing any of these graphs taking account solar activity either since that is our heat source after all.

[layla5alive]

That is a literal interpretation of the words "climate change denier."

It's meaning in the cultural zeitgeist, however, has evolved to include people who don't deny that the climate does change over time, or even is currently changing; but, who deny the science supporting anthropogenic climate change, specifically the clear impacts to atmospheric CO2 starting during the industrial revolution and driven primarily by fossil fuel emissions.

Essentially, I think most people would agree at this point that the common usage also includes people who deny we can/should do anything about climate change, or that the current situation vis-a-vis greatly accelerated climate change is our "fault."

The records re: CO2 are not hard to find, they come from ice cores and date back ~800,000 years.

You can start here, but there are plenty of independent resources online: https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/...

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

> An insanely large portion of the CO2 is simply us and our livestock breathing

Then explain why China, despite having more than four times as many people as the US, only has twice the CO2 emissions?

Can you even link a single study that puts anything but fossil fuel use as the primary contributor (by a wide margin) to atmospheric CO2? Because I couldn't in several minutes of googling.

> Presumably the world can much more quickly (due to vegetation) remove CO2 compared to those other chemicals

If that were true, climatologists wouldn't be so concerned about the problem, they'd just be telling us to plant some more trees.

[briantakita]

How do you know China's or the USA's CO2 emissions? Do you have both countries placed into a container with tools to measure the aggregate CO2 output?

Science is based on empirical observation. The map is not the territory & models are often wrong. We don't even know how often the models are wrong.

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

I am trusting the climate scientists who produced this data because they are the people who've spent their schooling and careers studying this sort of thing and their work has been vetted by the scientific community.

If you have a better standard of judgement then by all means present contradictory data.

[ben_w]

In addition to everyone else’s points, I’d like to note anthropogenic sources produce CO2 at 60-70 times the rate of volcanic emissions.

[xenocyon]

> An insanely large portion of the CO2 is simply us and our livestock breathing.

That is a remarkable claim - do you have a citation?

Regarding heavy metal pollutants etc - I agree that those are a concern, but that is more or less orthogonal to the climate crisis.

[knuthsat]

This claim is not true. I mean, it's so easy to go and read withouthotair.com and see how this stuff can be calculated on the back of an envelope.

Then you can try a little bit harder and do 2nd, 3rd and other order effects and get a bit more precise estimates.

To say that a 2 ton car moving represents a tiny part of CO2 emissions and that breathing is killing the planet is ridiculous.

[zzzeek]

perhaps they are confusing CO2 for methane emitted by large fields of livestock (at the cost of their consumption of vegetation no longer available to help capture CO2) which is a non-trivial portion of greenhouse gas emission.