Convince me that i should care about climate change

Climate change is one of the topics that i usually avoid because i do not know much about it but i lean towards the climate change deniers.Can anyone explain me firstly how climate change will affect the world in the future and secondly how can we make a big enough difference for it to count .Usually i am not convinced by people on this matter because they say something like :in the future,but i am not sure if in 10 or 1000 years something bad might happen but i don t know if it will cause significant problems and we should reduce our country's production because we could help but i am not sure our efforts will cause any change.

Well, in regards to the causes of climate change (pollution), those causes can also cause poisoned water supply and poisoned air, making it very difficult to, you know, live.

As for the temperature part, if the world gets hotter, then more parts of the Arctic and Antarctic ice melts. The water has to go somewhere, so if enough melts then the water rises. Just 50 meters would flood so many cities and heck most of Florida. Millions would die as a result.

I tend to very hostile towards deniers but since you're putting forward the effort to learn, I'm going to be very respectful and try to explain why you should care.

In terms of the way climate change works, the warming we are feeling is the warming caused by carbon burnt several decades ago. Thus you can't just turn off carbon emissions and hope for the climate to stop changing. All of the efforts to fight climate change in the 2000s and 2010s will not be felt for decades and thus the work we do in a few years will take even longer to stop the rate of warming. This is why it's so important to act now because a lot of the climate change is already locked in but we're trying to keep it below a point where it won't surpass 2 degrees(I think right now it's at about 1 with a great deal more locked in) which is when those significant problems(for the developed world anyway, the developing world is going to have a very hard time dealing with this no matter what)kick in.

One political argument for "why we should reduce a country's production" is that we won't, we'll just kill the fossil fuel industry and replace it with a cheaper alternative that has less risk to public health. Nuclear has been capable of taking over for fossil fuels for decades now, however a few high profile events of incompetence in the US, Russia and Japan have made that idea politically unpopular.  Renewable energy is also capable of taking over completely in the near future without us sacrificing anything. That argument tends to be made by politicians in the hands of the fossil fuel industry and people who hear what those politicians have to say and then parrot it. It's in the interest of some very powerful and influential people to continue burning fossil fuels and that really is the only reason to continue using them.  We're actually propping up fossil fuels through subsidies the industry has lobbied for and thus have prolonged how long they stay viable.

Another answer is that even climate change for some reason wasn't real, burning fossil fuels has a wide array of negative effects on the planet and human beings. For example pipelines and oil trains constantly have accidents and cause spills some of which risk local water. America has a water crisis right now that people don't talk about it and while lead infrastructure is a problem, so are pipeline leaks and fracking. Carbon also has a negative effective on public health.

Also most people who promote climate denial don't actually believe humans aren't causing climate change. We have evidence that Exxon knew several decades ago and went to great pains to release misinformation o the issue. The fossil fuel industry has also jumped at any opportunity to curb emissions without eliminating their need to exist "carbon capture, "clean' coal, natural gas etc). They know it's real and the politicians in their pocket know it's real(with a handful of unique exceptions) it's just that their best financial interest lies in ignoring the problem for as long as humanely possible. It's hard to find climate denial that can't be linked back to people who have an interest in it not being real. For example why would every other country on earth except the US and Syria sign the Climate Accords(the other country who didn't sign was Nicaragua who thinks the Accords didn't do enough and is protesting for very different reasons) including countries like China and India who have a great deal to lose by curbing their emissions. The boat on denial is done and most of the skeptical scientists who emerged in the 2000s are no longer deniers and have changed their mind.

Ultimately the greenhouse effect if left unchecked will eventually make the planet non inhabitable for humans and is a huge crisis. Stephen Hawking who might be the smartest man alive thinks we're all screwed as it is.

EmperorTigerstar wrote:Well, in regards to the causes of climate change (pollution), those causes can also cause poisoned water supply and poisoned air, making it very difficult to, you know, live.

As for the temperature part, if the world gets hotter, then more parts of the Arctic and Antarctic ice melts. The water has to go somewhere, so if enough melts then the water rises. Just 50 meters would flood so many cities and heck most of Florida. Millions would die as a result.

I know accidents can poison the water supply and the air but i think that if you do think properly you could avoid most accidents.I would like to see a study on how much the coal plants pollute the air in the US though if you have one .
As for the water rising ,i read that the consensus is the water could go as high as +1m by the end of the century,so nowehere close to wiping out cities.

FatDogIV wrote:

EmperorTigerstar wrote:Well, in regards to the causes of climate change (pollution), those causes can also cause poisoned water supply and poisoned air, making it very difficult to, you know, live.

As for the temperature part, if the world gets hotter, then more parts of the Arctic and Antarctic ice melts. The water has to go somewhere, so if enough melts then the water rises. Just 50 meters would flood so many cities and heck most of Florida. Millions would die as a result.

I know accidents can poison the water supply and the air but i think that if you do think properly you could avoid most accidents.I would like to see a study on how much the coal plants pollute the air in the US though if you have one .
As for the water rising ,i read that the consensus is the water could go as high as +1m by the end of the century,so nowehere close to wiping out cities.

I'll do you one better: scholarly articles on coal emissions.

Getting away from coal is just a good idea in general, in my opinion, even without factoring climate change. There are several reasons for this.

--Coal is out, and natural gas is in. Coal is dying, and there is nothing anyone can do to prevent this. US natural gas production has been so high recently that we actually had to burn it off from fracking sites, because harvesting it wouldn't have made a profit with the market so cheap. Natural gas is dirt cheap, and companies are shutting down coal plants and phasing in natural gas. Not only is it cheaper, but most of our coal plants are hitting 30+ years old, and we need newer infrastructure. It's cleaner too. Burning it gives off about half the CO2 of coal. The Smithsonian in 2014 estimated that the increase in natural gas versus coal in 2012 dropped carbon emissions by 3.8 percent. That's not too impressive, but that number has a lot of potential to grow. This is why natural gas is seen as a "bridge fuel." It's abundant and cheap enough to be realistic in the short-term, and it's clean enough to hold us over until renewables become viable enough for large-scale transition.

--Air quality. Burning coal does terrible things to air quality. This is especially apparent in China, where populations in industrial areas are dying of various lung diseases related to pollutants in the air. Even without climate change, this is something we need to care about.

--Related to the above, the money is there. China has been absolutely pouring money into research and development for renewable energy. Just this year, they announced a plan to spend an additional $360 billion (yes, in USD) to get 20% of their energy from renewable sources by 2030. They aren't just doing this for air quality. It's mostly because they know that if they corner the renewables market early, they can make enormous profit. The Chinese government has made no secret of its intention to become the world's manufacturing hub for solar panels and wind turbines. It is in the interest of US industry to get as much of an edge in this market as possible, or else be stuck forever buying "Made in China" energy technology.

--Another economic issue: coal can't be exported for any great profit. The coal industry hoped to keep itself alive on export dollars from India and China, two of the world's most promising growing markets, but this hasn't materialized. China is distancing itself from coal at a massive rate, and India prefers to buy its own domestic products. Neither country wants to be dependent on a US product.

President Trump can't save coal. And he shouldn't waste his valuable time by trying.

We're screwing up ecosystems with the Earth's rising temperature.

One example: Higher temps = more mosquitos = more diseases like malaria and Zika

The climate change is natural... every scientist will answer you that, the real problem is that we destabilize the amount of Co2 that... i don't know, the planet(? can absorb, and in a long time it would lead to a global warming, well, the global warming would happen even without us, the thing is that we are accelerating the process, after all, we are still in some kind of "Ice age". So yeah, everything related with climate is dangerous and we have to take care about it, because we are just animals right? every little change in the planet can wipe us out.

If you want something more detailed, you can read this article(actually it is a webpage that explain to the deniers or the people who want to learn what is happening with the planet... pretty good page, I've learned a lot with it):

PS: I use a lot of "that", don't I?... sorry about that

Arden_Foxx wrote:We're screwing up ecosystems with the Earth's rising temperature.

One example: Higher temps = more mosquitos = more diseases like malaria and Zika

Another big example is ocean acidification, although that's not exactly a temperature issue. The ocean absorbs about a quarter of yearly CO2 emissions, emissions which are rapidly increasing due to human industry. This CO2 reacts with the H2O to form H2CO3, commonly called carbonic acid. As carbon emissions rise, this reaction continues throughout the oceans, drastically lowering pH. It's the same mechanism behind acid rain. Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, oceanic pH has dropped by about 0.1. Since the scale is logarithmic, that equates to a roughly 30% increase in acidity. This is a huge problem. Not only does the acidification itself kill fish and other animals, it also causes an undersaturation of calcium carbonate minerals, meaning that shellfish can't build and maintain shells. This means oysters, clams, corals, and certain types of plankton are all at risk of extinction, which would devastate the oceanic ecosystem. About a billion people get their food primarily from the ocean, and the US economy is heavily invested into fisheries. Oyster aquaculture facilities on the West Coast are already seeing widespread failures with acidification as a contributing factor.

Here's the NOAA article I got most of this information from:

https://www.pmel.noaa.gov/co2/story/What+is+Ocean+Acidification%3F

EmperorTigerstar wrote:Well, in regards to the causes of climate change (pollution), those causes can also cause poisoned water supply and poisoned air, making it very difficult to, you know, live.

As for the temperature part, if the world gets hotter, then more parts of the Arctic and Antarctic ice melts. The water has to go somewhere, so if enough melts then the water rises. Just 50 meters would flood so many cities and heck most of Florida. Millions would die as a result.

It's important to note that most of the increase in water level will be due to expansion of existing liquid water due to temperature, rather than melting of ice.

I'm really adding nothing to this, but you should probably post this question on the "Change my view" subreddit on reddit.