Global warming? Oh no not again!!!

[rayner]

I've read this thread, nothing new I do most.
It's a fact the world is on a course to disaster. Can we stop it, I doubt very much that we can. Just enjoy our fishing whilst we can.
If it is possible to reverse, It's a shame not enough care enough to try.
Happy New Year to all.

 

[peterjg]

With risk of repeating myself (and even if the threat is false, though I don't think it is) we should ALL be doing what we can to lessen global warming, pollution, plastic waste, etc, etc. Let's ALL do what we can!

 

[no-one in particular]

I am not detracting from anything Peter has said, he is right of course however; these are all global problems; leaders have to put aside their egos and self interests to deal with them and credit where it is due, this young girl single handedly is trying to do that with climate change whether it is right or wrong or we agree with it or not, fair do's to her for that..

 

[silvers]

It would be interesting to see how many of the sceptics posting online are or have been working scientists? Or even scientifically trained? Enough to question the data or conclusions perhaps - or just to sow doubt in people's minds?

Most of the scientific consensus on this matter are not well-paid people who stand to gain from being in one or other vested interest camps - they're motivated by pursuit of understanding and truth.

I wonder why so many grown men (and it is mainly men) feel so threatened by a 16 year old girl who is simply asking them to listen to experts rather than what they want to believe? Shades of Michael (we've had enough of experts) Gove?

Anyway - my take is this:
1. Anthropogenic climate change is real and will increasingly affect human populations as well as the rest of the ecosystem
2. As well as CO2 and other GHG emissions, we humans are also directly damaging terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems through consumption and pollution
3. We don't yet have the technology, economic model or political will to live sustainably with the current world population
4. The last 10k years, since the end of the last ice age, have been remarkably stable in terms of global climate.
5. Current human civilisation is not well placed to be resilient to climate change - whether man-made or not.

So we absolutely should be changing, at an individual and national level (as well as intergovernemental), to reduce our impact on ecosystems and climate, to make our populations more sustainable and to make our societies more resilient to change.
Luckily, these are all things that will help to reduce GHG emissions as well, so it is win-win.

 

[Richox12]

Anyway - my take is this:

3. We don't yet have the technology, economic model or political will to live sustainably with the current world population

Hence, with the global population expanding at the huge rate it is, man will kill itself off.

 

[no-one in particular]

The population will not expand forever, it will level off, it creates more pressures and less breeding, sperm counts in men have been declining for years. I think we may have already reached the expansion limit, it will probably decline, there are signs that that is already happening. I do not think we will destroy ourselves this way and we will overcome the problems we cause through awareness, knowledge, technology and changes to the way we live. We already have a great deal, governments are making laws to clean everything up and have been for some time, individuals are changing their lifestyles and industry is changing considerably, they will have to further to meet the expectations of the consumer and governments, slowly for sure but it is happening.
I fully expect the world to be a different place in the future to what it is now.
It is already a lot different in my lifetime, no coal fires, pea soup smog, cleaner car exhausts, banned pesticides, cleaner sewage outfalls, cleaner rivers, industry banned from dumping waste willy silly, separate dustbins for green waste and there must be a lot more.
Climate change is difficult to predict right now so who knows; but we do and can change things.
An optimistic take on it all and I am sorry if it disagrees with some views but there are other ways of looking at things and no one has ever been able to predict the future so who knows who is right or wrong.

 

[nottskev]

It would be nice to hope that "governments are making laws to clean everything up", but with millions of UK citizens breathing dangerously polluted air, we shouldn't be complacent or under-estimate the resistance, business and populist, to environmental protection. Elsewhere, I'm not sure I'd say "cleaning everything up" sums up the the contributions of China, India etc, or even, at the moment, USA.

Far from being poised to clean everything up, we are only, in some cases, beginning to understand where the pollution is. For example, it's estimated that visible surface plastic in the seas and oceans only adds up to about 1/2% of the plastic that has been dumped in them. Scientists are discovering, deeper down, plastics broken into tiny pieces, acting more like a chemical dissolved in water. Microplastics are found at the bottom of oceans, carried by marine creatures or sunk in their secretions, Nanoplastics are found in the bloodstream and cell membranes of a range of organisms.

Like the sex-changing chemicals affecting fish in our rivers, the effects of many kinds of pollution have been driven far below the visible surface leaving plenty of scope for public apathy and feeble government action.

 

[Mark Wintle]

I think 'Climate Change' has become a quasi-religion. Its adherents use and misuse facts to further their claims, those who refute them are treated as heretics ('deniers'), and they even have their own prophet now. Like all religions it is misused by those in power to control the populace, hence the number of councils declaring 'climate emergencies' when their power to actually make the slightest difference is negligible. In the world as a whole billions have no interest in changing the planet for the better, only in striving to improve their quality of life to some sort of 'ideal' based on the Western life style, and the price paid for this is over exploitation of the earth's resources.

Interestingly, most of the things listed by Markg above, peasoup smog etc. as a thing of the past, are very much a reality in China and India

 

[nottskev]

Anyone with an interest can look up the scientific institutions and organisations which support the overwhelming scientific consensus regarding the reality of global warming and its effects. With a bit more patience, they can equip themselves with some understanding of the complexities of their work and publications.

To characterise the huge number of well-informed people who propose we recognise and act to forestall and mitigate the likely effects of global warming as religious bigots strikes me as extraordinary. I think we need to be far more worried about the widespread tendency for uninformed people to put up their own personal opinions, gut instincts and flakey arguments as things equal in validity. That many people magically know, without apparently studying the subject or understanding its concepts or any level of detail, that climate change science is tosh, suggests which side of the debate is the more "religious".

 

[no-one in particular]

I am not disagreeing with the above posts but I still think there is an alternative view. I don’t disagree with capitalism, I have enjoyed the results of it the same as everyone else but all the problems stem from it. Cheaper production, cheaper goods for the consumer without a thought where it might lead. Plastic, plentiful and cheap, coal the same for our energy, dumping of waste cost less than getting rid of it responsibly and so on. We didn’t care, did we, but the younger people are starting to protest loudly and want it to change and they are going to decide these things in the future. So, companies, industry and governments will change with it.
China and America are still more interested in their economies than anything else but I think they will change as the protests grow louder especially from the younger people.
The pollution in of our inner cities and China has grown worse, I acknowledge that but so have everyone else and hopefully this will be put right in time.
I also have a bit of faith in the earth to do it’s bit, the Japanese discovered a naturally occurring bacteria that ate plastic a couple of years ago, I mentioned it on here but I do not know what happened to it however, it shows the planet has ways to look after itself. Who knows if the planet has some undiscovered unknown tricks up its sleeve and won’t allow itself to frazzle into oblivion and do we really know all that’s going on and the causes of it.
I am not trying to say we do nothing and not worry about it and do nothing but it may not be the end of the world or us, it’s not a given. I don't have answers or understand all of it, maybe just a small part; I just do not believe we are on a inexorable path to utter destruction.
And another thing, look how much knowledge and understanding there is on here from a bunch of aging anglers on an angling forum, who would have guessed that; we have come a long way since say 50 or even 20 years ago, demonstrates to me how much further we may go.

 

[lambert1]

I think 'Climate Change' has become a quasi-religion. Its adherents use and misuse facts to further their claims, those who refute them are treated as heretics ('deniers'), and they even have their own prophet now. Like all religions it is misused by those in power to control the populace, hence the number of councils declaring 'climate emergencies' when their power to actually make the slightest difference is negligible. In the world as a whole billions have no interest in changing the planet for the better, only in striving to improve their quality of life to some sort of 'ideal' based on the Western life style, and the price paid for this is over exploitation of the earth's resources.

Interestingly, most of the things listed by Markg above, peasoup smog etc. as a thing of the past, are very much a reality in China and India

This debate has certainly divided opinion on this forum, but I think as anglers we are perhaps more aware than most of the issues of waste and pollution in our world and more specifically in its waterways. I am not sure that there is much evidence of concerns about climate change being used to control the populace as really despite all the recent debate, very little is being actually done by governments to reduce emisions. There is nothing prophetic about Greta as what she has said has been said before by others. Her initial strike was aimed at the government of her own country. The world media decided to run with it and she has subsequently had a great deal of publicity. The reality is that she is a young woman who has expressed her opinion. I do not think for one minute she sees herself as a prophet and all she is guilty of is capturing the imagination of her age group and those that are concerned about global warming. I totally agree with your last sentence.

 

[steve2]

So we can all change our ways. How many of us will walk or cycle next time they go fishing instead of loading up the car. Not fly off on holiday or work, stop eating meat, stop lighting their wood burning stoves, not turn on the lights. It's easy to say we can all change our ways but most of us never will.

 

[no-one in particular]

Her initial strike was aimed at the government of her own country. The world media decided to run with it and she has subsequently had a great deal of publicity. The reality is that she is a young woman who has expressed her opinion. I do not think for one minute she sees herself as a prophet and all she is guilty of is capturing the imagination of her age group and those that are concerned about global warming.

She has and what we have to realize these young people are tomorrows captains of industry, teachers, politicians and consumers. They will have been steeped in all this from a very young age. they wont tolerate it and these are the people that will be in power and pulling the strings.They will shape a different world, they won't be indifferent to pollution in the same way ours and past generations have been.

 

[Peter Jacobs]

The sheer volume of science would suggest that man does indeed have an influence (both good and bad) on the climate.

That a young Swedish girl has highlighted on an international scale the inherent problems is, to my mind, a very loud wake up call to many across the planet.

It would appear that to a segment of the population she is not the most popular young lady around, but then no harbinger of peril is rarely popular with everyone.

It is however truly sad that the likes of the POTUS are so voiciferously opposed, but then anything that might impinge on the US economy is ever popular with those of the 'male, pale and stale' contingent.

As someone said, above, it is one thing to say we will change our ways, but in reality, how many actually will?

 

[bennygesserit]

So we can all change our ways. How many of us will walk or cycle next time they go fishing instead of loading up the car. Not fly off on holiday or work, stop eating meat, stop lighting their wood burning stoves, not turn on the lights. It's easy to say we can all change our ways but most of us never will.

I have and do

 

[cassey]

AND into the melting pot goes a world that is massively overpopulated.

 

[maggot_dangler]

Have to say i have not seen much evidence plenty of supossed ideas i have seen ice core evidence that sort of says the opposite .

Also the prolonged solar minmum is having an effect to some extent .
But if you look back to 911 when planes stopped flying for a few days the tempreture actually rose .,

Cheers PG ...

 

[no-one in particular]

The sheer volume of science would suggest that man does indeed have an influence (both good and bad) on the climate.

That a young Swedish girl has highlighted on an international scale the inherent problems is, to my mind, a very loud wake up call to many across the planet.

It would appear that to a segment of the population she is not the most popular young lady around, but then no harbinger of peril is rarely popular with everyone.

It is however truly sad that the likes of the POTUS are so voiciferously opposed, but then anything that might impinge on the US economy is ever popular with those of the 'male, pale and stale' contingent.

As someone said, above, it is one thing to say we will change our ways, but in reality, how many actually will?

He would never get voted in with the next generations of voters or any politicians like him, politicians will have to be right on the ball with the environment to get anywhere. The same will go for manufactures if they want to sell there goods. Whether we agree with her or like her this young girl is helping to shape the minds of young people and many others like her.
I am sure pollution on the scale we have allowed it will be history one day.

 

[no-one in particular]

And are we ignoring how much has changed already just a bit in this country at least. I never thought coal energy would go. I never thought electric cars would be possible and the petrol companies would close it down if they were, maybe they will cure the pollution in inner cities eventually. The sale of plastic carrier bags have diminished and paper ones are coming back. Recycling and separation of waste. It is all in its infancy but it is going to keep going. I think one day other sources of clean energy will get invented like cold fusion or something. With a bit of luck someone will invent foolproof leak proof slurry tanks. I don’t know why that has not happened already.
Of course there is a long way to go and it has to happen in every country but I think the next generations are going to be on it in a big way.

 

[bleak]

On the subject...'Stark' by Ben Elton (published 1989) is interesting