Climate Change | UN Report: Code Red for humanity

Stack

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It's insane that the Americans, over 50 years, or 70, cut down as much forrest as was basically cut down in Europe over two thousand years if you think about it (much longer probably). Russian forest and the few African/South American (some Asian) are the lung of the world. We used to have lots of lungs, for an analogy, but we now have one (we need another and has to be via de-desertification imo or else we're all dead).

Canada, too, of course, thanks to its relatively small population and enormous landmass. (in terms of carbon capture and oxygen production).
The Americans arent the only ones of course. Here in NZ we have 0.01% of our original Kauri trees left, we started cutting them down in the late 1800s.
 

neverdie

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The Americans arent the only ones of course. Here in NZ we have 0.01% of our original Kauri trees left, we started cutting them down in the late 1800s.
Well, it's what that movement, colonization, to be frnak, did to Papua New Guinea and so on (and other Asian areas) which is more irritating to me. But all of this amounts to chopping down the means of human survival for economy and then wondering why we're all dying. It's fecking insane.
 

Bert_

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The Americans arent the only ones of course. Here in NZ we have 0.01% of our original Kauri trees left, we started cutting them down in the late 1800s.
The whole North Island was a massive forest full of them wasn't it? The empire needed more boats and farmland though so that took priority. The lack of forests was a problem for future generations to deal with. Same old story.
 

Stack

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The whole North Island was a massive forest full of them wasn't it? The empire needed more boats and farmland though so that took priority. The lack of forests was a problem for future generations to deal with. Same old story.
Yeah and it really hits home when you see one of them and how big they were. They are so rare and in remote places now.
 

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Jippy

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Demonstrating the problem with lots of right wing voters, they simply don't get that the impact to Britain isn't just hotter summers. How have we got to 2023 and people don't understand the potential impact of sea level rises and gulf stream changes.
Lots of angry comments but the usual ones based on personal experience too, though not sure they're all serious.

Rising temperatures? It's raining today and I've had to put a jumper on!
 

Pexbo

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Demonstrating the problem with lots of right wing voters, they simply don't get that the impact to Britain isn't just hotter summers. How have we got to 2023 and people don't understand the potential impact of sea level rises and gulf stream changes.
Lord Frost thinks we are not reliant on global supply chains. He’s a fecking imbecile.
 

calodo2003

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What's a farmer to do these days? Can't get hay too wet & can't get hay too hot...

 

glazed

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Demonstrating the problem with lots of right wing voters, they simply don't get that the impact to Britain isn't just hotter summers. How have we got to 2023 and people don't understand the potential impact of sea level rises and gulf stream changes.
Right wing politician think it would be cheap to adapt to climate change than to mitigate it. And they are right. Because the means to adapt will be confined to their supporters.
 

WPMUFC

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Has anyone else thought of a potential career change into climate policy / environmental management / sustainability as a result of all these scientists going "we can't believe some of the data we are getting"?

I've tended to put my personal egg's in the "just vote for the best climate policy and make personal changes" for most of my life, but part of me now thinks I've got to be much more hands on and get into the weeds.

Just a thought i've had recently and was wondering if anyone else was feeling the same :)
 

calodo2003

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Has anyone else thought of a potential career change into climate policy / environmental management / sustainability as a result of all these scientists going "we can't believe some of the data we are getting"?

I've tended to put my personal egg's in the "just vote for the best climate policy and make personal changes" for most of my life, but part of me now thinks I've got to be much more hands on and get into the weeds.

Just a thought i've had recently and was wondering if anyone else was feeling the same :)
I’m still in the ‘reward those wineries / breweries / distilleries who are carbon neutral, organic, etc. with more business’ model.

I have given thought to uprooting my life & heading out to Washington state or Oregon & become a cellar rat for an environmentally sound winery. That’s probably all I could feasibly do.
 

utdalltheway

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Scroll down....blue checks....conspiracy.....conspiracy.....stop talking about climate hysteria......who cares we can just build cities that float, we are much smarter than before.

Yes. All so predictable. These probably are the same types that thought civil rights is a bad idea.
We’ve always had them, just now they're amplified with the blue checks.
 

Jericholyte2

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The whole anti-plastic revolution seems to have been largely kicked off by Blue Planet.

I reckon a proper Climate Change movement will need stoking from a major TV show/movie, rather than a protest. An Inconvenient Truth did a reasonable job of that a few years ago. Maybe Attenborough can do his bit again.

I don't think a bunch of smelly hippies stopping traffic is going to help in the long run, as much as I agree with their message.
I thinks that’s what ‘Don’t Look Up’ was trying to be, but the money behind the right wing media outlets is too big now, I just don’t see how anything penetrates them to really get the point across.
 

Gehrman

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Has anyone else thought of a potential career change into climate policy / environmental management / sustainability as a result of all these scientists going "we can't believe some of the data we are getting"?

I've tended to put my personal egg's in the "just vote for the best climate policy and make personal changes" for most of my life, but part of me now thinks I've got to be much more hands on and get into the weeds.

Just a thought i've had recently and was wondering if anyone else was feeling the same :)
Does anyone know of good surveys regarding to world wide sentiments regarding climate change. Since it involves the lifestyle of people world wide it would be interesting to know. I mainly found this but i would like find one that includes developing countries as well.

https://www.pewresearch.org/global/...-are-willing-to-alter-how-they-live-and-work/
 

noodlehair

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Has anyone else thought of a potential career change into climate policy / environmental management / sustainability as a result of all these scientists going "we can't believe some of the data we are getting"?

I've tended to put my personal egg's in the "just vote for the best climate policy and make personal changes" for most of my life, but part of me now thinks I've got to be much more hands on and get into the weeds.

Just a thought i've had recently and was wondering if anyone else was feeling the same :)
I already kind of have done this (although more natural progression than a conscious climate decision tbh), and the problem remains the same in that no one actually has any remotely realistic answer, and even when they do no one seems to like it. I'm fully pessimistic about the whole thing since as long as human population continues to grow, so will the resource problems that come with that, and this goes hand in hand with climate change and also with people's level of selfishness or room to maneuver towards making any kind of sacrifice.

The other problem is that although everyone is naturally anti climate change and doesn't want to destroy the planet, getting people to do even tiny things to help even now is invariably either massively unpopular, massively disruptive, completely impractical, or some combination of the three.

E.g. just a couple of examples:

Sustainable housing - They recently bought in new rules in England for house building requiring new homes to be fitted with electric car charging points, but then had to put in a loophole for developers that they can just not do it if its too expensive, then had to put in another loophole that developers don't have to do it if the parking is on the street. Then had to say to developers you can't put any electric car charging points in anyway if you have a covered or underground car park area because its a fire/life safety risk. The government also completely dumbed down the updated regulations on energy conservation in new buildings, because otherwise no new homes would get built and we kind of desperately need them. The rules around using renewable or high efficiency energy sources in new houses for example, is literally a sentence in a guidance document saying developers should "consider" it and provide evidence that they have. So they can just get a quote on a few heat exchange systems and say "look it cost money so we didn't do it".

Its easy to blame the government for not being tougher, and I think fair to as well to an extent, but at the same time their hands are tied because we don't have enough houses, and developers hands are also tied because their profit margins are actually very small and a potential homeowner either wont or can't pay more for a home because its more energy efficient (Its almost like all that money thrown away on PPE and whatnot might have come in useful to plug the gap somewhere...)

Sustainable energy - We could have 100% wind energy probably within 20 years if we really invested in it. The EU has a published report showing its feasible for the entire of Europe and would actually be cheaper than any non-renewable source. The problem is you have to build wind farms and then you have to maintain and often re-build them because they have a fairly short lifespan, and you can't build them out of sustainability. You build them out of actually quite environmentally damaging material such as concrete, and then need to transport it usually to the middle of nowhere or to the middle of the sea, which also has a fairly sizeable carbon footprint, since you can't have a wind farm in the middle of a town, and then have to build an infrastructure to transport the energy back to people's homes. So even though its more environmentally friendly that non renewable sources, purely because it is renewable, its still not necessarily the answer. The tories have also pretty much mothballed it as a policy, presumably because they're a bunch of bellends.

Side note, but it also grinds my gears that people like Just Stop Oil don't jump on things like this rather than stand around blocking cars in the ULEZ zone.


I would love to be a decision maker in these kind of processes as I'd go to town on it, but I'd also be the most unpopular man in the country because I would target laziness or luxury/convenience over impractical stuff like the 15 minute city thing (which is still wildly unpopular anyway). I'd fine people who drove their kids to school if the school was less than a mile away (with exceptions for those with accessibility issues, etc.). It'd be a massive fine too...big enough not to risk it even if the chance of getting caught is very low. SUVs or any vehicle that isn't built for efficiency would be banned outright. You'd get two non essential flight journeys per year (one to get to your holiday, one to get back)...anything above you'd need to apply for some kind essential flight exemption, and it'd have to be a good reason like a dying family member or needing to get out of Luton. Inner city areas would be essential business traffic + public transport only rather than ULEZ (so Tom Cruise would be getting the tube to his movie premier), but then there'd be incentives to have a low emission vehicle if its used for business purposes. I'd basically be climate Hitler and probably be forced out within a month...and even if not it still wouldn't make any real difference.

So basically creating environmentally friendly wine is probably the best you can do.
 
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TwoSheds

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I already kind of have done this (although more natural progression than a conscious climate decision tbh), and the problem remains the same in that no one actually has any remotely realistic answer, and even when they do no one seems to like it. I'm fully pessimistic about the whole thing since as long as human population continues to grow, so will the resource problems that come with that, and this goes hand in hand with climate change and also with people's level of selfishness or room to maneuver towards making any kind of sacrifice.

The other problem is that although everyone is naturally anti climate change and doesn't want to destroy the planet, getting people to do even tiny things to help even now is invariably either massively unpopular, massively disruptive, completely impractical, or some combination of the three.

E.g. just a couple of examples:

Sustainable housing - They recently bought in new rules in England for house building requiring new homes to be fitted with electric car charging points, but then had to put in a loophole for developers that they can just not do it if its too expensive, then had to put in another loophole that developers don't have to do it if the parking is on the street. Then had to say to developers you can't put any electric car charging points in anyway if you have a covered or underground car park area because its a fire/life safety risk. The government also completely dumbed down the updated regulations on energy conservation in new buildings, because otherwise no new homes would get built and we kind of desperately need them. The rules around using renewable or high efficiency energy sources in new houses for example, is literally a sentence in a guidance document saying developers should "consider" it and provide evidence that they have. So they can just get a quote on a few heat exchange systems and say "look it cost money so we didn't do it".

Its easy to blame the government for not being tougher, and I think fair to as well to an extent, but at the same time their hands are tied because we don't have enough houses, and developers hands are also tied because their profit margins are actually very small and a potential homeowner either wont or can't pay more for a home because its more energy efficient (Its almost like all that money thrown away on PPE and whatnot might have come in useful to plug the gap somewhere...)

Sustainable energy - We could have 100% wind energy probably within 20 years if we really invested in it. The EU has a published report showing its feasible for the entire of Europe and would actually be cheaper than any non-renewable source. The problem is you have to build wind farms and then you have to maintain and often re-build them because they have a fairly short lifespan, and you can't build them out of sustainability. You build them out of actually quite environmentally damaging material such as concrete, and then need to transport it usually to the middle of nowhere or to the middle of the sea, which also has a fairly sizeable carbon footprint, since you can't have a wind farm in the middle of a town, and then have to build an infrastructure to transport the energy back to people's homes. So even though its more environmentally friendly that non renewable sources, purely because it is renewable, its still not necessarily the answer. The tories have also pretty much mothballed it as a policy, presumably because they're a bunch of bellends.

Side note, but it also grinds my gears that people like Just Stop Oil don't jump on things like this rather than stand around blocking cars in the ULEZ zone.


I would love to be a decision maker in these kind of processes as I'd go to town on it, but I'd also be the most unpopular man in the country because I would target laziness or luxury/convenience over impractical stuff like the 15 minute city thing (which is still wildly unpopular anyway). I'd fine people who drove their kids to school if the school was less than a mile away (with exceptions for those with accessibility issues, etc.). It'd be a massive fine too...big enough not to risk it even if the chance of getting caught is very low. SUVs or any vehicle that isn't built for efficiency would be banned outright. You'd get two non essential flight journeys per year (one to get to your holiday, one to get back)...anything above you'd need to apply for some kind essential flight exemption, and it'd have to be a good reason like a dying family member or needing to get out of Luton. Inner city areas would be essential business traffic + public transport only rather than ULEZ (so Tom Cruise would be getting the tube to his movie premier), but then there'd be incentives to have a low emission vehicle if its used for business purposes. I'd basically be climate Hitler and probably be forced out within a month...and even if not it still wouldn't make any real difference.

So basically creating environmentally friendly wine is probably the best you can do.
Bit of a pearl clutchy take. Just because it's hard it doesn't mean it can't be done, it just means we are currently making a very poor fist of it. To take the example of your charging points, if the developers really can't afford it (which I very much doubt), then the government needs to step in and either pay for it or do some deal en masse to get a better price for them or something like that. And if you need more money to do it then it's wealth tax time on anyone worth more than £5m. You could also raise corporation tax which is laughably low. Or capital gains tax which even the mega rich with a conscience still pay a lower rate of tax on than an ordinary sucker employee would on their income.

The thing with environmental legislation is that no one action will get you there, you have to push on every front, and you have to join up your policies and consistently reward good environmental behaviour and punish bad.

It's like being in a war, you can't just say well we tried sending a few ships over there and they all got blown up so we'll have to surrender. Ok the ships didn't work, let's try some planes. Oh they didn't work either? Well then let's send some ships AND some planes. It all has to work together and you need multiple solutions for different problems.
 

Gehrman

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Bit of a pearl clutchy take. Just because it's hard it doesn't mean it can't be done, it just means we are currently making a very poor fist of it. To take the example of your charging points, if the developers really can't afford it (which I very much doubt), then the government needs to step in and either pay for it or do some deal en masse to get a better price for them or something like that. And if you need more money to do it then it's wealth tax time on anyone worth more than £5m. You could also raise corporation tax which is laughably low. Or capital gains tax which even the mega rich with a conscience still pay a lower rate of tax on than an ordinary sucker employee would on their income.

The thing with environmental legislation is that no one action will get you there, you have to push on every front, and you have to join up your policies and consistently reward good environmental behaviour and punish bad.

It's like being in a war, you can't just say well we tried sending a few ships over there and they all got blown up so we'll have to surrender. Ok the ships didn't work, let's try some planes. Oh they didn't work either? Well then let's send some ships AND some planes. It all has to work together and you need multiple solutions for different problems.
But isnt noodles touching upon the fact we live in a democracy? For the policies to fall into place you need the backing of the majority of voters. If some policies become unpopular the politicians vouching for them will be replaced with someone "in touch with common man".? And i do think a lot if stuff you mentioned is reasonable.
 

TwoSheds

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But isnt noodles touching upon the fact we live in a democracy? For the policies to fall into place you need the backing of the majority of voters. If some policies become unpopular the politicians vouching for them will be replaced with someone "in touch with common man".? And i do think a lot if stuff you mentioned is reasonable.
The last Labour government weren't perfect by any means but they managed a kind of half joined up policy on environmental stuff. Every government has some unpopular policies, it's Starmer fantasy to think you can only have popular ones and it's better to have none than a controversial one. But assuming they win the election 5 years is a long time, they need to get the unpopular stuff in early so it has time to take effect.
 

Gehrman

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The last Labour government weren't perfect by any means but they managed a kind of half joined up policy on environmental stuff. Every government has some unpopular policies, it's Starmer fantasy to think you can only have popular ones and it's better to have none than a controversial one. But assuming they win the election 5 years is a long time, they need to get the unpopular stuff in early so it has time to take effect.
Didn't Boris want to make non EV illegal to buy before 2030? I honestly don't know where that is atm, but i guess i can do a quick google search.

Edit; made a major typo
 
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TwoSheds

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Didn't Boris want to make non EV illegal to buy before 2030? I honestly don't know where that is atm, but i guess i can do a quick google search.

Edit; made a major typo
Yes but this is exactly the problem. A big hand wavy glorious sounding policy, not backed up by other actions, and then generally followed by a large U-turn. You have to say it, then back it up, then keep backing it up. And if you do that you'll generate investment, improve the state of the environment, and have a stable economy and society that works for more people. Chaos is great for disaster capitalists but not for ordinary boring investors unfortunately.
 

berbatrick

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https://www.kentonline.co.uk/news/n...-against-jail-terms-for-scaling-bridge-95215/

Two Just Stop Oil protesters jailed after scaling a bridge on the Dartford Crossing have lost a Court of Appeal bid to have their sentences reduced.

Morgan Trowland, 40, and Marcus Decker, 34, were jailed after using ropes and other climbing gear to scale the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge, causing gridlock when police closed it to traffic last October.

At a hearing in London last week, the protesters’ lawyers made a bid to challenge the “extraordinary length” of Trowland’s three-year sentence and Decker’s jail term of two years and seven months.

But in a ruling on Monday, their appeals were rejected by three senior judges, who said the sentences were “not excessive”.


The judge added: “The sentences should not be seen as having a ‘chilling effect’ on the right to peaceful protest or to assembly more generally – deterrence and ‘chilling effect’ are not the same.
 

moses

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I have no idea either, yet.
That's really dark and will kill moderate protest unless the political parties get involved.

Otherwise protest will be minority and extreme and easily beaten in a PR war via the tabloids. They will turn the readers against the protestors, just like they did with Unions.
 

Duafc

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That's really dark and will kill moderate protest unless the political parties get involved.

Otherwise protest will be minority and extreme and easily beaten in a PR war via the tabloids. They will turn the readers against the protestors, just like they did with Unions.
I'd say that tide has broadly turned already regards Just Stop Oil.

The impending global weather disasters, extremes and associated awfulness will make them realize it's a poor take, you'd think...
 

TwoSheds

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That's really dark and will kill moderate protest unless the political parties get involved.

Otherwise protest will be minority and extreme and easily beaten in a PR war via the tabloids. They will turn the readers against the protestors, just like they did with Unions.
Yep, it's not a democracy any more really. Starmer won't do anything about it. Imagine 3 years basically for stopping traffic. Capita when they were doing their eternal roadworks on the M6 should have seen the directors sent to jail for 50 years if this is fair.
 

moses

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I have no idea either, yet.
Yep, it's not a democracy any more really. Starmer won't do anything about it. Imagine 3 years basically for stopping traffic. Capita when they were doing their eternal roadworks on the M6 should have seen the directors sent to jail for 50 years if this is fair.

Oh yeah it's fecking outrageous. Labour will do feck all with Starmer. You can be sure hes fecking useless now he has Alastair Campbell's full support.
 

Smores

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It's odd how easily its accepted at home where as if the press covered a story about China jailing protesters for a similar thing the commentary would be very different.

We can't protest in any meaningful way and we're in a two-party state where the parties share a lot of policy. We're fecking doomed.