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.
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.
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! ?
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.
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.
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.
I do not wish to be cancelled so will not get into a debate on the causes of global warming. However:
We are consuming the raw materials of the planet at an eve increasing rate to satisfy our demands for growth and having to have the latest thing. Phones, computers, TVs etc are replaced every one or two years. products are designed to last the warranty period and not much longer. Products are designed to be cheap to build and non maintainable.
We have politicians and a population who consider it reasonable to offshore our production to low cost countries with high CO2 output while making production uneconomic in our country with high “green” taxes. We pretend we are a knowledge economy while our education system slips down the world rankings and then any home grown knowledge company that succeeds is sold off to foreign owners who can asset strip it.
And to make it worse we are censored by the woke brigade. The BBC had too apologise for letting a government minister, who has no climate qualifications, make anti manmade climate change comments without a corresponding balancing comment. But we have an unqualified Saint Greta who's every pronouncement is reported without any corresponding counter argument.
To quote Private Frazer “ We're doomed”
With regard to coal, about a decade ago the Govt gave away big tax breaks for the R&D of ‘Scrubbers’ to take out the solids and other nasties from the exhausted by-products created by burning coal and other fossil fuels. It was mysteriously withdrawn once the Govt had bought into the climate change brigade's nonsense.
If we truly wished to go green, there is still plenty of low hanging fruit to pluck which would make a larger and more meaningful reduction of waste in all its forms. It just takes the political will to do it, and we wouldn't have stock up on logs and candles every winter as a consequence. Wasteful packaging is one such. Pollution of our water courses is another, and there are many more which would benefit from reform.
As for the greens, how do they reconcile the extraction of rare metals used in the construction of electric car batteries? And what of the disposal of spent batteries which will be full of some of the most poisonous materials known to man?
A timely release of a video by one of my favourite youtube channels on this subject!
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