After reading out some statistics from the deadly Hawaii wildfires, they played a clip from a member of the Young Americans for Freedom, a conservative youth activist organisation, who said climate was the number one issue for young people.
Asked to raise their hand if they thought mankind was to blame, not one went up. And only one candidate said climate change was real in the short discussion that followed.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said it was childish to ask for a show of hands and instead laid into Joe Biden for the president’s response to Hawaii.
(actually 50 yrs ago since the first rumblings of climate change went public).
Actually 127 years ago. Svante Arrhenius published a paper indicating that creating so much CO2 could potentially alter the Earth’s surface temperature to such a degree that it may affect life.
That was in 1896 about 130 years after the start of the industrial revolution. So by that point we had a pretty significant amount of CO2 in the air already.
Human beings have been dumping CO2 into the atmosphere hard for the last quarter of a millennia. I usually bring this up because people need to understand, even if we stop today 100%, we’ve got at least five centuries of a problem on our hands. Because it’s going to take at least twice as long to clean things up as it did making the mess.
And that should help people understand how difficult a problem we have because we need a solution that can work for us for 500 years at least. I mean we’re doing nothing right now which is just making the problem worse, but solutions aren’t ever going to be a one and done thing. Just swapping over to solar or just driving EVs aren’t going to cut it. It’s a good start but we must reinvent all of human society on this planet for the next half millennia to actually solve the problem. That is the actual task that lies before humanity. There has never been a more complex challenge put before mankind ever in the history of all existence for Homo Sapiens.
Disagree. They said we could not possibly sustain the growth of human civilization due to how much food we could produce, but then we had the industrial revolution and we could make more food. That was not imaginable before, but it’s life now.
Of course, that leads to where we are. We now have to invent a way to use green energy to essentially make carbon dense something and put it back into the ground. It’s a monumental task, sure, but I have a feeling humanity could figure it out quickly if we would just TAKE THE DAMN ISSUE SERIOUSLY.
I mean really. We made a vaccine in record time when the whole world was scared of something. Let’s get scared again and all work together on this.
Don’t worry, we can count on some conservative “expert” spouting about how if we do effective atmospheric carbon capture that we will kill all the plants and end the world. I know because I have already had people try to make that argument with me. It was all I could do not to solve a single source of carbon emissions in that moment. So dumb.
I just meant that the carbon from ~30 years ago is what is affecting us today. Like others have said we have been theorizing that carbon can cause climate change since a bit into the industrial revolution. Not sure when we “knew” it was real though.