This is a good summary. However:grenfell wrote: ↑Mon Jun 27, 2022 5:35 pmI watched a youtube video some time ago which put it all in really simple terms. It's probably still there but I can't remember the title and equally can't be bothered to trawl through youtube to find it again.Frnc wrote: ↑Mon Jun 27, 2022 6:24 am
2. The climate. Global warming. I know WOTW is sceptical, but I did post a lot of stuff to explain the science. We can see the extreme weather of the last few years around the world. This is just the start. The very beginning. But big change could be quite rapid. If feedbacks kick in. Eg, if the tundra thaws, more greenhouse gases will be released. If arctic ice melts, more sunlight reaches the ocean. If the ocean warms, it can't store as much CO2.
Put simply there are two possibilities . The earth is warming or it isn't and we have two options . To do something or to do nothing. That gives four scenerios.
1It's real and we do something to combat it.
2 It's real and we do nothing
3 It's not real and we try to combat it
and
4 It's not real and we do nothing.
1 gives us a chance
2 we're boned
3 we're ok but spend a lot of money
4 best case scenerio where we are ok and still have a nice lifestyle.
25% of going extinct , bit of a no brainer as I see it.
"3 we're ok but spend a lot of money"
Solar and wind are now the cheapest ways to generate electricity in the UK. Nuclear and coal are dearer. Gas is slightly dearer, and does overlap wind and solar. But the figures I saw were almost certainly before gas prices skyrocketed. So now the picture should be clear. Also, I saw predictions from BP, and wind and solar were predicted to decrease further in price, and stay cheaper.
I would like to see the government retrofit our homes. Proper insulation. This would cost a lot, but it would create jobs and save us all money in the long term. It's too expensive and too technical for most poeple to do themselves. Weirdly, home energy certs still recommend new gas boilers. I'd like to see them switch to heat pump, and the govt to invest in that industry, to improve efficiency and reduce price.
Another area is transport. Improving public transport, making it cheaper, reduces individual transport which is usually fossil fuel powered. Many countries have much cheaper public transport. Someone posted on twitter yesterday that they just paid about £125 for a year's ticket that enables them to use trams, trains and buses! It cost me nearly that to get to Brixton and back, once.
Getting back to your list...
The chances of it not being real are pretty slim. The consequences are as you say, potential extinction. How much is being done? Some, but not enough. A likely scenario is that we are at a fork in the road. To the left is a stable trajectory to long term, very high warming, 8°C eventually, as feedbacks kick in. To the right is 2° and a return to less than two in decades. To turn right would be almost impossible, the amount of change we would have to make in a short time. The image below, from a scientific paper, compares the two with a glaciation cycle of the ice age.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1810141115