Read an article that said if the UK was to sink to the bottom of the sea tomorrow, and no longer exist, global CO2 emissions would reduce by 2%.
Wonder why the Just Stop Oil protestors don’t converge on Beijing or Moscow and disrupt traffic/sports events, spray paint or glue themselves to building and roads, and generally cause disruption and inconvenience to every day life there to get their message across?
Trollin’, Trollin’, Trollin’ … 
I think every country has to do their part. The narrative that because I am not the biggest contributor so let the bigger contributors do something first before talking about what I should do, I think that’s the wrong way to look at things.
However I am very disturbed that protesters like this actually think that these acts advanced their cause? As a neutral, I get more put off by them if any. Does not mean I do not believe in the climate crisis anymore but I am less inclined to listen to anything these groups have to say.
Yeah right! so you can ignore there’s even a problem!
I can acknowledge there is a problem like I did and yet not listen to these disruptive groups
Yes, just ignore them, they are not your problem (unless of course they glue themselves to your car).
What’s important is focus and the focus should be on the enviroment and climate. We are approaching possibly catastrophic temperatures because instead of action people have decided to focus on side issues. Since the '80s when all was well identified along with the seriousness of the issue.
We congratulate ‘ourselves’ on the ozone however even back in the '80s it was clear this would get ‘reasonably’ dealt with.
We went to the Banksy exhibition in Glasgow on Monday night. When we entered we had to put mobile phones in a locked pouch prior to entering. I didn’t think much of it but my wife pointed out that anyone wanting to protest by chucking soup, powder or whatever is unlikely to do it if there is no-one to document the stunt.
Is this why they are now doing this at sporting events and the like because they are guaranteed coverage?
There was a spate a few years ago of chucking milkshakes at the likes of Farage. Personally, I thought this was a waste of a perfectly serviceable dairy drink but wouldn’t they be better off doing something similar to oil executives and their lobbyists?
This argument seems to growing in popularity, I think the only fair way to look at the problem is with per capita emissions however. UK fairly high in that list (Canada and Australia at the top).
But when it comes down to it, climate change is going to fuck with all of us so just pointing finger else where isn’t going to help much. We all need to do what we can.
Russia would only be about 5% and is the 4th largest emitter. There are only two countries above 10%, and none above 33%. So I guess no one is responsible.
Does this hold serious scientific ground? I mean, we weren’t taking global measures 200 years ago, never mind 100k years.
I know that ice carrots have been analysed over the past decades, but I wonder if that is enough to come to that conclusion with such a blunt certitude?
Sure, we only have direct measurements going back about 150 years, but there are hundreds of proxies for historical temperature. Making an estimation from a proxy measurement definitely adds error, and how you fit all the various data points into a model to give you an answer adds more error. But “error” in this context doesn’t mean “wrong”. The scientific debate here is mainly in characterizing the error so they can say “we can be even more confident in the value of this proxy” or “this proxy doesnt give us the precision we thought”, but this is all just work in the margins. It is really hard to conceive of any finding being capable of changing the way scientists interpret the totality of their data in a way that has practical relevance,
not surprising that the two countries with lowest population density are the highest. Wonder if those scientists consider the distances which have to be driven between cities for essential goods and services to travel.
Note that Canada is carbon negative, our forest remove more CO2 emissions that Canadians put out. weird, eh?
Maybe we should be taking a closer look at the countries with volume, not per capita.
If it means shit talking the Aussies, I’m down with that.
Between tree rings, ice cores, lake sediment and several other proxies, there is no evidence of global average temperatures ever exceeding 17 deg C in the past 125 000 years. It is of course possible in the 40 million days or so, there might have been one weird day that left no trace or evidence. But we have no evidence of that. The correlation of the proxies to physical measurement is fairly well understood. So all the data we have supports that statement, and the +/- 0.1 deg C provides a confidence interval.
That just isn’t true, and hasn’t been for at least 20 years. Our forests are net emitters now, and were before this year’s fire season. Between forest fires and insect infestation (spruce budworm and pine beetles are both negative feedback loops on climate change), NRCan will tell you that Canadian forests have been net emitters since circa 2001. Why the heck else do you think we chose to exclude them from our national inventory (all countries have that option under the UNFCCC)? Because including them would make us look worse, and at the time would have increase the cost of Kyoto compliance. You can be pretty damn sure that the Harper government would have done a U-turn on that option if it would have been beneficial.
What Canadian governments have tried to do is to suggest that forest fires and insect losses should somehow not count, only human-related changes. Leaving aside the fact that is not the standard, by that accounting, Canadian forests become a carbon sink again. But that still gets nowhere close to the claim that Canada as a whole with land-use (forest and agriculture) is a negative emitter.
Canada’s emissions are ~ 700 Mt, excluding land-use from the accounting as either a debit or a credit. Put forestry in, take away deductions for forest fires and insect die-off, and you still only get to about 30 Mt absorbed. That doesn’t even cover BC’s net 60 Mt, not to speak of Alberta’s 256 Mt. Put another way, it is less than 1/6 of emissions from the oil and gas sector alone - which doesn’t include transport emissions.
Canadian industries are producing 40% less greenhouse gases than they were 10 years ago.
as for the forests, welcome to the after-effect of the pine beetle infestation from 20 years ago…
the government did not allow for selective logging and proper forestry management/reforestation, and now we’re dealing with the after-effects of these policies.
Well, no.
That data you screenshot is for the electrical industry, not all industry. Ontario shutting down Nanticoke (huge coal plant) is responsible for a large cut of that reduction. For all industry, the reduction is rather less impressive
No bonus points for guessing what changed in 2020, or what 2021 is going to look like. We have done reasonably well in holding to sort of a plateau, I guess. The increases in oil and gas have offset the reductions in electrical.
oh well, guess we’re fucked then.
Elliot Jacobson (professor with the x-number of hottest days in 100k years) has a website more or less dedicated to that idea. He thinks we are doomed, and it is becoming harder to fend that idea off. Going to the same forested lake almost every year for over 50 years, I can see the change in the land - in ways I couldn’t even just 5 years ago. Worse, I have been able to breathe it. This forest fire season is probably an outlier in just how bad it is, but I have no memory of fire smoke like this before 2017. Forest fires in Quebec almost always used to be a localized thing, now there is a fire east of James Bay damn near the size of Belgium.
Fortunately, it has been a couple of weeks since the last polar vortex current funneled it down to us.
just another of mother nature’s way of slowing down our growth. I think she was hoping that Covid would have taken a bigger portion of us but that failed. thinking a food/water shortage is next.
I really don’t feel like the Mad Max post-apocalyptic scenarios are that far away, probably at the end of my lifetime. Hopefully I’ll have moved far enough north by then to get away from the cities.
