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Why have climate change concerns suddenly increased?

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MattA7

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Why has the concerns regarding climate change suddenly became a top priority again? We have known about global warming and carbon emissions for over two decades and it was a important topic back in the early/mid 2000s then died down (at least in politics/media) until the past year or so.

Has there been any reason for this? It seems to be all we hear about in the media at the moment.
 
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najaB

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Has there been any reason for this? It seems to be all we hear about in the media at the moment.
Option A: Because the vested interests in traditional energy haven't been able to suppress it any more.
Option B: Because the vested interests in alternative energy have been able to push it to the forefront.
Option C: Because there's a big climate conference coming up.

Choose your preference.
 

yorksrob

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Because of an alarming increase in severe weather events at home and abroad.
 

birchesgreen

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Yeah, the effects are starting to be felt. Its no longer an academic abstract idea, it is already destroying peoples' lives.
 

deltic

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Why has the concerns regarding climate change suddenly became a top priority again? We have known about global warming and carbon emissions for over two decades and it was a important topic back in the early/mid 2000s then died down (at least in politics/media) until the past year or so.

Has there been any reason for this? It seems to be all we hear about in the media at the moment.
Margaret Thatcher made a speech to the UN about climate change back in 1989 and was a key driver in banning CFCs which were destroying the ozone layer. Since then none of our PMs have been of a scientific bent and in the present cabinet only one minister has a science degree. The same probably applies to other countries. Hence science has been ignored until now when it is probably too late to do much about it.
 

seagull

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Climate change has always happened and always will.
I'm all for sensible stewardship of our finite resources for future generations.
However we're now seemingly entering a new stage where we are prepared to stop at no expense to give ourselves the illusion we can control the climate and indeed planet earth in future.
Unintended consequences of hasty actions could definitely prove problematic.
 

najaB

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Climate change has always happened and always will.
Yes it has, yes it always will. However anthropogenic climate change is a new phenomenon.
However we're now seemingly entering a new stage where we are prepared to stop at no expense to give ourselves the illusion we can control the climate and indeed planet earth in future.
99.9% of species that have evolved on Planet Earth have gone extinct. We will also go extinct. The only question is when and why.

I would rather it be due to something outside our control than by our own hand. Planet Earth will continue regardless.
 

Darandio

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I would rather it be due to something outside our control than by our own hand. Planet Earth will continue regardless.

Until the sun swallows us in a few billion years, by then we'll be long extinct. As with all matters relating to the universe it shows just how insignificant we really are but equally should make us realise that we need to make a decent fist of protecting what we do have.
 

yorksrob

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Until the sun swallows us in a few billion years, by then we'll be long extinct. As with all matters relating to the universe it shows just how insignificant we really are but equally should make us realise that we need to make a decent fist of protecting what we do have.

Unfortunately we still have the ability to take a lot of wonderful species with us, even before the sun does its thing.
 

HSTEd

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Because we've failed to achieve anything like the required decarbonisation for the last two decades and every year that goes by the line our emissions to follow has to get steeper and steeper.
 

Gostav

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we are prepared to stop at no expense
That is a very interesing point, it looks like only western NGOs want stop at no expense (abandon military, industry, mining), the most non-western countries are not (China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Brazil etc.) and also they haven't patience to deal with those western enviroment NGOs such as Greenpeace and Extinction Rebellion.
 

AndrewE

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That is a very interesing point, it looks like only western NGOs want stop at no expense (abandon military, industry, mining), the most non-western countries are not (China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Brazil etc.) and also they haven't patience to deal with those western enviroment NGOs such as Greenpeace and Extinction Rebellion.
Interesting comment, especially as I have just seen this: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/oct/22/we-can-save-capitalism-or-the-planet-not-both (we-can-save-capitalism-or-the-planet-not-both)
What is required now is precisely a break with that logic. Looking to governments to deliver a plan which, to succeed, has to depart from the processes and ideological underpinnings of capitalism is a dead end, both as metaphor and as intent. What we actually require is an environmental movement akin to the Communist International, and an end goal which, like the Russian revolution, at least pre-Stalin, shows that a different form of life is possible. We need to be ambitious and imaginative, but we have to accept and embrace the fact that our goal is anti-systemic. The idea of green capitalism is a myth that will take us over the precipice.
The letters are all saying something similar, so I had better go back and read the original article!
 

Domh245

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Climate change has always happened and always will.
I'm all for sensible stewardship of our finite resources for future generations.
However we're now seemingly entering a new stage where we are prepared to stop at no expense to give ourselves the illusion we can control the climate and indeed planet earth in future.
Unintended consequences of hasty actions could definitely prove problematic.

It's important to differentiate between natural climate change, and anthropogenic climate change. There's an increasing realisation that pumping greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere for decades has vastly outweighed natural processes and that if we don't want to exterminate ourselves yet we ought to stop. We're not trying to control the climate or planet earth, we're just trying to stop having such a huge additional influence on it

To make an analogy, we're not trying to build sea defences to stop coastal erosion, we're deciding to stop placing explosives at the foot of the cliffs (though we should be preparing strategies to mitigate the inevitable consequences of climate change at this point)
 

takno

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Aside from COP26 I don't think any of it is particularly happening "now". Certainly there's a bit of a media frenzy, but that's just a mix of COP26 and needing something to fill the front pages now that Covid isn't working so well.

In terms of consumer and voter concern there has been a continuously growing appetite over 20 years for less fossil fuels, greener food, and a weird largely irrelevant obsession with plastic. That might be more recently driven by different generational thinking, clever corporates getting in on the act, politicians seeing it as a vote winner or a couple of hot summers and cold winters. Either way, it's not very new.
 

Domh245

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and a weird largely irrelevant obsession with plastic

Plastic is certainly irrelevant to the climate change movement (although, every little helps - less plastics produced = less oil dug up = less energy consumed = fewer emissions) but is part of a broader sustainability awakening. You can "blame" Attenborough and his films of choking sealife for that particular focus

There's no reason why we can't reduce emissions and improve sustainability (less plastics, less deforestation, etc) - in many cases both benefit from the same actions, though in other areas they do clash (replacing plastics with paper a prime example) - the risk is people conflating the two and going all-in on one aspect and neglecting the other
 

JKF

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A lot of the focus on plastics seems like tokenism, pissing in the wind. Go out on any bin day and see the number of ‘bags for life’ put out with the rubbish, probably only used a handful of times yet containing hundreds of times as much plastic as the old thin ‘disposable’ bags. Or at the school where I work where they decided to stop using single use plastic straws, so dumped several large boxes of unused ones in the bin. Stuff like this might make people feel good but then go about their business in ever larger cars etc.

We need bigger meaningful changes and efforts that might actually feel like an inconvenience if future generations are not to curse our laziness and disinterest.
 

Gostav

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There is reason to believe that most of the "climate activists" active on the Internet are just trying to make money from NGOs such as professor Julia Steinberger's post on twitter
degrowth is anti-racist, anti-colonial, anti-fascist, pro-decent damn health systems and health workers, supports youth climate movements & Greta, is feminist, pro-LGBT rights, for good living & work conditions for all, and generally decent.
what a typical person who plays with identity politics.
 
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najaB

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There is reason to believe that most of the "climate activists" active on the Internet are just trying to make money from NGOs
Definitely "some", but it's probably a stretch to say "most".
 

takno

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There is reason to believe that most of the "climate activists" active on the Internet are just trying to make money from NGOs such as professor Julia Steinberger's post on twitter:"degrowth is anti-racist, anti-colonial, anti-fascist, pro-decent damn health systems and health workers, supports youth climate movements & Greta, is feminist, pro-LGBT rights, for good living & work conditions for all, and generally decent." what a typical person who plays with identity politics.
Certainly that person I've never heard of appears to think that a list can be used in lieu of an argument, and apparently thinks that people who support some or all of the things listed (which is basically everyone) was born yesterday. I can't see what that has to do with NGOs though, and I don't think that one person stretches to "most" of the climate activist active on Twitter.
 

Drogba11CFC

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One fb advert aimed at me is aggressively promoting insect consumption. I told them to bugger off.
 

takno

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One fb advert aimed at me is aggressively promoting insect consumption. I told them to bugger off.
I do that with all Facebook ads. If you are willing to take the time to respond to every single as by clicking "I don't want to see this", "I don't want to see anything from this advertiser" and "not relevant", the number of ads you get soon drops right off.

I could quite happily eat insects as long as they were mashed up and given an innocuous name though.
 

AM9

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This looks like a dinosaur rant thread. Not much acknowledgement that climate is changing as a result of human behaviour, or maybe afraid to admit it because it would require them to change their behaviour.
 

Gostav

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This looks like a dinosaur rant thread. Not much acknowledgement that climate is changing as a result of human behaviour, or maybe afraid to admit it because it would require them to change their behaviour.
I think the major porblem is some people (environmentalists) very much care about climate change and talk about it almost every day, but do not do anything practical or change their behaviour or just changed the least important part.
 

takno

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This looks like a dinosaur rant thread. Not much acknowledgement that climate is changing as a result of human behaviour, or maybe afraid to admit it because it would require them to change their behaviour.
So you say that in spite of at least half the posters explicitly stating that the climate is changing due to human behaviour. I mean we could all go to a lot of trouble to declare just how concerned we are, but that wasn't really the question being asked was it?

For the record, climate change worries me a lot, and I have no doubt at all that it's driven by human behaviour. I'm particularly concerned because a lot of the things I was crying out for 20 years didn't happen and still aren't happening. Meanwhile we have a green lobby which will stop at nothing to divert all the goodwill and attention onto stuff like plastics, biodiversity and marine waste, often pushing solutions which make the real and pressing climate crisis even worse.
 

GusB

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There is reason to believe that most of the "climate activists" active on the Internet are just trying to make money from NGOs such as professor Julia Steinberger's post on twitter

what a typical person who plays with identity politics.

Identity politics? Hmmm

degrowth is anti-racist, anti-colonial, anti-fascist, pro-decent damn health systems and health workers, supports youth climate movements & Greta, is feminist, pro-LGBT rights, for good living & work conditions for all, and generally decent.

Anti-racistTick
Ant-colonialTick
Pro decent health systems and health workersTick
FeministTick
Pro-LGBT rightsTick
For good living & work conditions for all, and generally decentTick

That sounds to me like a good all-round list of qualities I expect in people that I meet from day-to-day. Maybe there's a bit of a language barrier here, but it very much sounds to me that you're against all of this. Please tell me I'm misreading your post!
 

AlterEgo

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Identity politics? Hmmm



Anti-racistTick
Ant-colonialTick
Pro decent health systems and health workersTick
FeministTick
Pro-LGBT rightsTick
For good living & work conditions for all, and generally decentTick

That sounds to me like a good all-round list of qualities I expect in people that I meet from day-to-day. Maybe there's a bit of a language barrier here, but it very much sounds to me that you're against all of this. Please tell me I'm misreading your post!
How does “degrowth” achieve ANY of that? How, if you work to make the population smaller, do you support vulnerable, poorer people when they get very old? Retirement pensions are predicated on there being enough people of working age to pay them.
 
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