Climate Change: Changing Sceptics' Minds

[Roobaba]

Climate change: The young activists changing the sceptics' minds
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-67521051

As global leaders gather at the COP28 summit in Dubai, environmental activists around the world are still challenging climate sceptics. Young people from five countries told BBC News how they are trying to change the minds of those who wrongly claim climate change is not real.

Come on you people get a grip, sort this BIG problem out.

[New Judge]

The young people need to accept that many people believe climate change is happening but they query whether the measures being taken to deal with it are effective. "Fighting" climate change is rather akin to fighting the Covid virus - and look how that turned out.

[Roobaba]

This is not helping either..

COP28 host UAE to massively ramp up oil production, BBC learns
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-67513901
 

[webbo3]

Climate change is fake, its called weather, too hot= climate change, too cold=climate change, too wet=climate change.

Its a scam to get money out of people.

https://ibb.co/MfZqHy8

https://ibb.co/VQqM06L

https://ibb.co/Wvtg1Qf

https://ibb.co/g6fPH3x

https://ibb.co/bWXFQtJ

[ClareTG0ld]

webbo is, of course, entirely wrong, and posting a few out-of-context snapshots of media articles from years gone by does nothing to support that position. The distinction between climate and weather is well-known, and unarguable. That the Climate is changing currently is beyond reasonable dispute at this point; and the overwhelming weight of evidence is that human activity is largely responsible.

[webbo3]

Out of date articles, which are predicting doom and gloom which hasn't happened also very hot weather has happened in the past.

[Lie-in King]

"Climate change is fake..." - webbo, you're an idiot, along with all the others on this site that dismiss the problem.

Humans are undoubtedly responsible for the astonishing changes we're seeing.

Too many people = not enough land; not enough resources; not enough food/water; fewer species (that actually deserve to be preserved).

I asked once before, I'll do so again - where is a set of "Infinity Stones" when you need them?  Bloody humans, absolutely disgraceful species.  Evolution has a lot to answer for.

[ClareTG0ld]

The first point is that articles in newspapers (or mass media in general) is not where you do to look for accurate scientific reporting. Often what's happened is that the extreme scenario is highlighted even if it was only one of dozens discussed - thus making the predictions look more dire and immediate than intended.

Taking as an example sea level rise. This is a well-documented impact of Climate Change, and is already happening to an extent, driven by warming sea temperatures and by ice melts in the Antarctic. But many images show what might happen if the sea level rises by tens of metres, whereas most estimates suggest that it would take 2000 years or so for sea levels will rise by that much, rather than the implied years or decades.

Also, yes - the world has at times been warmer. But that's not relevant to understanding what's going on now, and is no comfort either. The World's also been colder, or wetter, or had more oxygen in the atmosphere, and less, etc. But large-scale change in conditions is destructive. The wold will be fine at the end of it, but doesn't enjoy the change one bit, and neither will we.

[ClareTG0ld]

I want to add that the "tens of metres in 2000 years" is an upper estimate. If we assume that warming can be limited to 2 degrees or so, then it would be likely less than five metres by then. At the moment, the annual sea level rise is something like 1.5millimetres on average.

So, yes - dire warnings as they may exist are often extreme predictions that should be understood as unlikely by their nature; and, besides, the time scale of predicted changes is often larger than made out. None of which undermines the fact that the sooner we get our act together, the better.

[tomus42]

Whatever people believe is irrelevant. 

All that matters is the actions that governments take, or don't take.

If Webbo thought it through he'd realise that 'they' don't really have go to the trouble of perpetuating a huge hoax like this to take money off people. They can just do it anyway.

[dave50]

No matter what the scientists say, no sane person will accept being pushed into poverty based on the deranged rants of the eco loons. 

[Old_Geezer]

Like most things in life. Balance needs to be found to get the best result.

 

A present problem is that some nations take this less seriously than others, by a wide margin. Those trying for change will find their efforts to go even further achieving little, leaving the control with those who simply pay lip service to the issue. A chain is only as strong as it's weakest link.

[tomus42]

Which is what I mean about governments acting or not OG.

As long as China and Arabia aren't interested nothing will change. Webbo sticking it to the man by turning his heating up won't affect anything except his gas bill.

[Sven666]

Lie-in King – “… Humans are undoubtedly responsible for the astonishing changes we're seeing…. Bloody humans, absolutely disgraceful species.  Evolution has a lot to answer for.”

You appear to hate mankind.  If you despise the proliferation of the human species so much, there’s a very simple thing you can do to reduce the amount of people living on the planet by one.  But misanthropes like yourself never seem to want to do that.

As for your claim that we’re seeing “astonishing changes”, what would those astonishing changes be I wonder?  Sea level rise is completely within natural variation limits at around 2mm per year and has been for the last several thousand years.  The average global temperature is also completely within natural variation limits.  It’s actually significantly colder today than it was during the times of the Roman Empire when CO2 was around 250 parts per million.  Natural disasters are less now than they’ve been since records began.  The number of hurricanes making landfall in the Americas has dropped off a cliff in the last several decades.  Forest fire burn acreage has reduced spectacularly in the last 100 years.  I could go on and on.  But rather that look at the empirical evidence for all of this, you chose to assert without a shred of evidence that we’re seeing “astonishing changes”.

[ClareTG0ld]

I won't go through each of Sven's claims in detail, but most of them are at best misleading and at worst wrong.

Take the claim that the world was warmer c.2000 years ago. This is a reference, presumably, to the Roman Warm Period. But that was a local phenomenon, not a global one; see eg https://boris.unibe.ch/132301/7/333323_4_merged_1557735881.pdf .

The "forest fire burn acreage" stat also seems misleading - key is that data gathered 100 years ago or so doesn't reliably distinguish between wildfires and intentional fires (either arson or land clearage), and therefore can't be used as an indicator of natural trends. Also, again, this is a local statistic, as all the sources I can find specifically discuss North American fires rather than global ones.

The claim that hurricanes making landfall in the US has "dropped off a cliff" is also wrong. In this case, as seen in eg https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indicators-tropical-cyclone-activity (Fig.1), the landfall trend is flat, and, as the link notes, "changes in observation methods over time make it difficult to know whether tropical storm activity has actually shown an increase over time." (emphasis added). So while it's too soon to say that hurricane activity is increasing in response to Climate Change, it's definitely wrong to say that it's decreased in the last century.

The "natural disasters" stat is too vague to comment on. Which natural disasters? Many (eg earthquakes, volcanoes etc) would be wholly unconnected with climate change; also, since humanity has generally got better at responding to disasters, the effect of any given disaster might be lesser than an equivalent one 100 years ago even if the modern severity/frequency is greater. So for this I'd like more clarification on the source.