If this survey is real the messages these young people are receiving are completely wrong.
We need to reduce our impact on our planet but CO2 is a complete red herring. The current ECS (temperature increase for a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere) is centred around 3°C (IPCC AR6). The 2°C will destroy civilisation is simply made up.
If there really is a shortage of C02 then we need to get some coal dug and burnt quickly at some newly built powers stations. We are sitting upon vast reserves of the black stuff, and we can create our own power and our power and C02 whilst we are at it. What's not to like?
Soot, acid rain, mercury vapour and all the other nasties that come from burning coal. And we don't yet have any cost-effective way to collect the CO2.
Well for starters, the wokes in California put a stop to all previous woodland management which has now enabled the build-up of dry brush, an eminently flammable substance just waiting for some whacky-baccy smoking hipster to come along and set it alight with a carelessly discarded butt. Then, you have too many people settling in an ever decreasing area of wilderness. Higher the population density the higher the risk of fire.
If there really is a shortage of C02 then we need to get some coal dug and burnt quickly at some newly built powers stations. We are sitting upon vast reserves of the black stuff, and we can create our own power and our power and C02 whilst we are at it. What's not to like?
The Prime Minister estimates that there is a “six out of 10” chance of getting other countries to sign up to financial and environmental targets ahead of November’s Cop26 climate change meeting.
In reality, it must be zero out of 10. Does the Prime Minister seriously think any government would sign up to a policy that is causing an energy crisis in Britain? Carbon taxes are designed to eliminate coal and gas; renewables are useless when the wind doesn’t blow.
This crisis is self-inflicted. In the past 10 years Britain has decommissioned reliable power stations producing half our peak energy needs, closed valuable gas storage facilities and now relies on other countries to provide substantial amounts of electricity.
The Prime Minister should abandon the unattainable net-zero policies until we have a reliable source of electricity.
All Kwasi Kwarteng, the Business Secretary, can come up with is yet more renewables. These already add over £440 to everyone’s electricity bill just to pay for the billions in subsidies. Goodness knows what our bills will be when Ofgem increases the cap.
Climate change is real. If you lived in California, or British Columbia, it has been happening to you monstrously over in particular the last couple of years. I lived in California for 18 years, know about and have experienced wildfires. It has been recently massively exacerbated, to a level that has not occurred within the many-thousand-year history of some of the trees that burned. That a place in BC this summer came within a few degrees of having the highest temperature ever recorded on this planet, and then burned up a couple of days later, is hard to believe. But it happened. The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation has been losing stability over the course of the last century, and could well collapse in the next decades. That is likely to affect Northern European weather enormously.
Let us not pretend that none of this has happened and is happening.
Global warming during the anthropocene has been confirmed, in many ways, over thousands of studies over decades. Global warming is bound to affect climate, in certain well-studied ways, as well as those less well studied (the “heat dome” over the Western US in July was not specifically foreseen, as far as I know).
Let us not pretend that this is not happening.
Whatever might be causing all this, it is all - obviously - real. The question is: what to do about it. If you live in a small town in one of the large areas of California that has become newly dangerous in the last two decades, you might seriously think about upping sticks and moving to some place less dangerous, which is likely to be far more expensive to live in and you may not be able to do it. If you live in some place moderately less dangerous, you might well want to be out on the streets demonstrating for your government to do something about it, because not everyone can move.
Then there are people trying to determine the causes of global warming, of Arctic warming, of heat domes over the Western US, of massive concentrations of water vapour over the Eifel in mid-summer, of ……… Be sceptical if you like, but these recent massive changes have causes. Whatever those causes might be, they might not necessarily be anthropogenic greenhouse gases, although the evidence is pretty overwhelming that (a) these gases are there in much higher quantity than in previous years, and (b) um, the gases “trap” heat in the biosphere (that is how they get their name, unsurprisingly), and (c) the effect you expect from that is indeed present. But if you don't think those causes are linked to anthropogenic global warming, then you owe us some other causes and some reasoning from those causes to the drastic phenomena which are being observed.
Younger people, with little or no political power, have noticed for a long time that older people with lots of political power seem to be unable to get their act together to do much about any of these causes. (Let's start small, say with pervasive wildfire danger in California and what politics can do to avoid your family home burning down in the next ten years.) If I were 20, I would be pretty p'd off about this, and I can hardly blame those 20-year-olds (or younger) who are.
Legh Richardson:
Just to confuse matters, the reduction in the supply of gas, we now appear to be desparate for CO2 to package and fast freeze our fruit and veg.
Can't live with it and can't live without it…what a climatic pickle we've got ourselves in!
Legh ?
There's billions of tons of CO2 in the atmosphere we don't want, let's suck it out and use that. Also reduces global warming, simples!! Nobel Prize please! ?
CO2 is a distraction, but the one message that is highlighted is that we need to do better at looking after this one planet that we have to live on. The pace of destruction and pollution is growing wildly, driven by short sighted & selfish greed. I'm glad the young are standing up for their futures.
Andy,
In general, I would agree with your comment - to check the original report -, but with the thousands of pages of the full IPCC reports, its is too time consuming. Knowing that the Summary for Policymakers is politically motivated and often contains claims contradicting with the contents of technical reports, I find independent summaries made by not just "someone" but independent climate scientists with earlier IPCC connections like Dr. Pielke helpful.
I know personally only a few people with engineering background who are true believers in the CO2-related CAGW hypothesis. All of them are characterized by a blind faith in IPCC authority and findings, refusing to look at any other data sources or critical commentaries. I would think that after having a look at CO2/temperature relationship records and El Nino/temperature upswing correlation, any person with analytical mindset would realize that arguments supporting the "climate control knob" functionality of CO2 at current atmospheric concentrations are weak. We should be grateful that scientists like Dr. Ole Humlum are willing to apply their efforts to analyzing and aggregating public sources of globally available climate data on the monthly basis, offering a wealth of consolidated reports for those willing to learn to understand at least some of the climate trends and processes:
www.climate4you.com/.../Climate4you_August_2021.pdf
A good starting point for the open-minded would be the video recording of US Senate Climate Change Hearing of March 2013 where Dr. Don Easterbrook, professor emeritus of geology, presented the facts why CO2 cannot have caused the current mild global warming.
I always thought that climate change was part based upon the release of bovine methane due to the overproduction of cow products.
I maybe wrong! But that is the point, its the maybe, the willingness to believe that the evidence on climate change is related soley to human activity.
It doesn't help when ‘activists’ use pictures of cooling towers to advertise examples of climate change.
Legh
Simon,
‚Consensus’ and ‘Belief’ are not words to do with science, they are words to do with politics and religion.
I am quite happy with the concept of climate change, there is sufficient data to back it up. I support reducing our impact on our planet, reducing the consumption of finite natural resources and improving our use of land and oceans. What I do not support is the scaremongering rubbish and wild demands of the climate activists.
With some joined up thinking we can steadily work on improvements.
We can of course also do it the green way. Let’s shut down the nuclear power plants in Germany so they can burn lots more brown coal. Let’s protest against a coking coal mine in the UK so we can buy the steel for our wind turbines from China with all the added emissions that involves. (The heat for some of the steel making processes can come from electricity or hydrogen but the fundamental process requires carbon).
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