Now the climate crisis is self-evident, a common argument by those who STILL defend polluters is that “NZ is too small to make a difference, and so shouldn’t have to stop intensive dairy farming or driving Ford rangers to school in Auckland”
Rod Carr destroys it in this mic-drop moment.
If you don’t trust climate scientists to represent the actual climate science, then I don’t know what to tell you.
This has nothing to do with trust. They put out forecasts and we know with 100% certainty that all of their forecasts underestimated how much warming there was going to be and how fast.
Why would you give them your blind trust after such a performance?
Do you really believe they were wrong in all of their previous forecasts but now they are right?
And to counter your disgusting accusation that I am anti science:
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is an intergovernmental body of the United Nations. It’s not “the climate scientists”. It’s a political body and it’s obvious that it’s white washing what their scientists are telling them and bowing to political pressure.
So fuck off with your insult and calling me a science denier.
The IPCC is a body made up of some of the top climate scientists from around the world. They work to summarise the latest climate science over the last few years. So it is definitely a scientific body.
Where is the scientific evidence that says it’s too late and there’s nothing we can do?
The collection of studies which show that all the predictions of the IPCC so far have underestimated both the magnitude and the velocity of climate change.
You’re right that the IPCC has tended to be conservative in it’s estimates (I.e. that warming / effects have generally progressed faster than predicted).
But it’s a huge jump from “things are worse than we thought” to “things are hopeless, there’s nothing we can do”. The science explicitly contradicts the latter. If we bring emissions down to near zero by around 2050, things will be way better than they could be. No serious climate scientist would argue against that. We also have most of the technology to achieve that without completely crashing the economy too.
It’s not a huge jump.
Have you seen this?
https://www.axios.com/2023/05/01/ocean-temperature-spike-climate
What makes you think that’s even possible. There has not been one year in the entire history of mankind where global carbon emissions were less than the previous year. How do you think we will get to zero.
Yes… climate change is happening, things are going to heat up, weather extremes are going to get worse. There is no way to stop that happening completely… but I suggest you should think about leaping to extremes… just because things are bad (or worse than we thought) does not mean hopelessness is justified. If you go to hospital with a broken arm and they do some tests and say “looks like you’ve also got diabetes”, you don’t instantly give up on life because things are bad. With climate change, things are bad, but not hopeless. Again, read what the scientists are saying… very few (if any) legitimate scientists are saying we are 100% doomed and shouldn’t even try to fix this.
First, that parts not true. Emissions in 2020 dropped around 7%. It was largely due to COVID lockdowns, but still shows it’s possible.
We have a pretty clear scientific and technical plan to limit climate change by reducing emissions. I’m not saying it will be easy or that it will definitely even work. But there’s absolutely no reason at this point in time to think it’s impossible. “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take”. Going back to the medical analogy, if someone says you can have an operation that will give you a 50% chance of survival, but if you don’t have it, you’ve got 100% change of dying, what would you do?
And what makes you think that because something has never been done before it can’t be done now? People said we’d never abolish slavery or go to the moon… Every new thing humanity has done had never been done before at one point.
It’s also worth thinking about who a “doomerism”/“hopelessness” mindset serves? If it’s completely hopeless, then there’s no point doing anything. The people with the money (e.g. fossil fuel giants) would absolutely love for us to do nothing, because they’ll be able to keep raking it in. And they can (or think they can) use that money to avoid the catastrophic shit that is coming. For them, hopelessness is as good as climate denial. And you can bet they are trying to foster that as much as they can with disinformation campaigns.
Did the global emissions drop or did the rate of increase drop?
Because the mechanisms that caused the problem are still in place and you aren’t going to upend capitalism anytime soon.
No they want you to do stuff and take responsibility so they don’t have to. There is a reason you think the burden is on you and me instead of the corporations and the governments.
Absolute global emissions dropped 7%, see: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co-emissions-by-region?time=2010..latest
(If you expand out the date range, you’ll also see there are other years where there were drops).
I am glad for you that you can be 100% confident about what will happen in the future!
This is quite different from what we’ve been talking about so far. We’ve been discussing whether society as a whole can do anything about climate change, and you’ve been arguing that there’s absolutely nothing we can do.
There’s a separate discussion about who or what is responsible and/or needs to make changes. All our say about that is that it will be everyone who needs to make changes.