Climate change, is it happening? Yes, it has done ever since we had a climate. What’s the cause, can it be changed, what do we actually need to do? Who needs to do what and when. What’s realistic. The world will go on without humanity, whatever we do.
How do we convince people of our views: Gluing ourselves to roads, enjoying an echo chamber of like minded individuals, calling those who don’t agree with us names, demanding change, demanding action, suggesting a course of action that’s unrealistic, be unwilling to compromise, all or nothing
These are some questions we all need to as ourselves. It’s like Aesop’s fable, The story concerns a competition between the North Wind and the Sun to decide which is the stronger of the two. The challenge was to make a passing traveller remove his cloak. However hard the North Wind blew, the traveller only wrapped his cloak tighter to keep warm, but when the Sun shone, the traveller was overcome with heat and soon took his cloak off.
Is going green, reducing climate change better, cheaper lets sell the benefits, convince people…Or just continue to berate those who don’t do what we think they should. Do we understand their views (or even want to), because if we don’t, we are unlikely to be able to change them. Is it better to call someone names or convince them to make even 1 change that helps?
I read a lot of things in this thread. The overriding theme seems to be, we must stop this and this and etc.. and force people to do x y z…nothing about educating, convincing etc..
Take power, I hear people talking about more renewables (windmills solar etc…) but I don’t see people gluing themselves to the roads to force the government to go Nuclear. If they get their windmills and solar, it guarantees the continued existence of coal and gas fired power stations. As the two technologies must go hand in hand. If you want to be rid of fossil fuels in the power chain, then there is no option but to go Nuclear, at which point solar and wind etc.. don’t make any sense because of the way Nuclear reactors work. I’m talking about the decay of Iodine 135 (a fission product) into Xenon 135..
https://www.nuclear-power.com/nuclear-power/reactor-physics/reactor-operation/xenon-135/
In essence this means, if you run a fission reactor down to very low power levels from full power, it will effectively scram itself and if you shut a reactor offline you can’t switch it on for 3 days (Xenon dead time). So if all your windmills are running and the sun is shining, that reactor still has to be running pretty much full on. All they can do is bypass the steam turbines, but the nuclear fuel is still being used. The Wind and Solar are not saving us a penny or benefitting us in any way. It does cost us a LOT of money, though.
We have to have a strategy we all agree on and en sure that governments pursue it, more importantly it must be one that makes practical and scientific sense…which is something we do not have at the moment.
I want fossil fuels out of the chain as soon as is practically possible, because they are a hugely valuable and limited resource…liquid gold that we are effectively going up in smoke.
I like to think of myself as an eco warrior and have even had my heating off since 1st Feb, my house is so insulated that 9 days ago, it was 13C outside my house and 9C inside, so I opened all my windows to warm the house up, while people were outside in coats. It will never be enough though, nothing we do in the UK will ever be enough. Still I do it, but when I see the vitreol, the name calling and the anger from people somehow better than the rest of us, the lack of compromise, it dismays me…..as I am sure that’s not the way forward.
P.S. When I look down at my T-shirts and see holes in them, or they look a bit worse for wear, I don’t think “I need another T-shirt”, I think, “if I keep wearing this cotton T-shirt for a few more years” I will have done my bit. I wonder what else I can do. I sometimes wonder what other people think when they see holes in my T-shirts?