Climate Change

I always believe that we should always look after and respect our planet, it's the only one we have we an eco system.

As for climate change, there is nothing in the world that we can do to stop it. Pre ice age, our planet temperatures were a lot higher than they are today. The global temperatures have been slowly returning to these temperatures for millions of years. Our moon is slowly moving away from our planet each year and will eventually move so far away that it will leave our planet causing our magnetic fields to change poles causing chaos with our planet. Our Sun is growing in size and will eventually engulf our planet, destroying our planet. This all won't happen in our life time, but our planet won't be around for ever.

I'm not a vegan/vegetarian. I do eat meat, I have red meat as a treat once in a blue moon. I mainly eat white meat, chicken and fish. Even vegan/vegetarian are not completely meat free. All food will contain some form of meat contaminate as allowed by the food quality standards, insects and wild animals are killed in the growing and harvesting of crops.

Wind turbines are not 100% environmentally friendly. They kill birds and companies installing them into the sea, detonate the sea beds to clear them of any potential WW2 unexploded bombs, these blast kills many of the sea life and cause damage to the sea beds.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/54780888

There is talk about our sea levels rising. Back in Roman times, Great Yarmouth was under water. During the Victorian times the piers were build to dock ships, the sea used to flow in under the piers. Nowadays the sea don't come any where near the Great Yarmouth piers and you won't get any ships near them.

Volcanos and our seas give off more pollution than us humans do. For me the biggest threat to our environment is not what we put into our atmosphere, but the amount of trees, forest and Jungle that are torn down each day. These trees are the lungs to our planet, without them, we have nothing filtering out all the pollution. Us here in the UK are no different, over hundreds of years, we have taken down more than 80% of our trees.

Yes we all can do our little bit to look after our planet, but what we do will count for nothing if other counties continue to pollute and chop down trees at the rate that they do.

One good thing that Covid and during lockdown has shown us, all this pollution and damage can be reversed very quickly

Unfortunately the likes of our messiah and everyone's favourite politician dishy Rishi Sunak wants everyone to jump back into their polluting cars etc and get back to the office when they can be just as productive without leaving the house, in the name of the almighty economy.

D4n said:

What exactly is your point? That none of us should bother making any changes because some of the things that we do will harm the environment regardless?

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pluk said:

Yes, doing something is better than not doing anything at all, small changes add up,

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D4n said:

It feels like you're judging people for not making big enough changes whilst proudly beaming about being unwilling to make any changes at all yourself.

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Nice bunch of assumptions there, well done.

I think it's a pretty valid point that our chosen shared interest is horrifically bad for the environment. Theres an element of truth to my firmly tongue in cheek initial Valhalla comment. Almost every visit will involve travel, often lengthy, often internationally, rarely on public transport. The parks themselves are powerhouses of energy consumption, from construction to ride and attraction operations to creating the traffic movement. And it's all entirely frivolous; no one NEEDS to be at a theme park.

Not judging people for making changes, but questioning whether those changes are actually an improvement. Its a healthy question to ask of those making the change. To swap readymeals in spoons and think you've achieved something when the reality is it mat well be worse than your original option would be a bit of a shame, wouldn't it?

As for me, I grow my own fruit and veg on an allotment, I pickle my produce, I use my local butcher not supermarket, I rarely buy processed food like readymeals and premade sauces. I avoid unnecessary packaging where I can, use my local refill store, recycle passionately, avoid fast fashion. So make changes and try to live well? Yes, absolutely. Bleat about it on the internet? Not unless I'm asked, because all that is nothing compared to the impact I have.

RoyJess said:

Volcanos and our seas give off more pollution than us humans do.

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Just want to refute this statement
https://www.newscientist.com/articl...s-human-co2-emissions-are-too-tiny-to-matter/

I’m not going to be holier than thou and pretend my hobbies don’t cause a huge amount of pollution and I also drive a 3.0l diesel but I’m not a complete Trumpian.
I’d also be a hypocrite not to eat meat when I make my living working in the industry, a lot of untruths are told about our industry and how wasteful it actually is.

It is however a completely ignorant person that doesn’t think things like reducing waste are a good idea, we should look after our planet for sure.
I’m indifferent on how much effect humans are actually having on the change of our climate but I will agree we are slowly destroying our planet with waste especially plastics.

Thameslink Rail said:

Just want to refute this statement
https://www.newscientist.com/articl...s-human-co2-emissions-are-too-tiny-to-matter/

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It is quite an ignorant thing to 'refute' that.

Natural things such as Volcanoes do indeed pump far more pollutants into the atmosphere.

But are we not raping our seas wildly of all life, yes we are. The oceans have microorganisms in that are one of he biggest consumers of CO2 and producers of oxygen. With our massive overfishing we are wiping these out and thus the planets ability to absorb all this CO2. Be it from natural causes or human made.

It is a similar story with our rainforests.

The argument point, that things other than humans pump more CO2 into the atmosphere is not only ignorant, but at this point, totally and completely irrelevant.

The fact we are reducing the planets ability to deal with this is what is alarming and dangerous.

I think Climate change is natural changes supercharged by humanities actions.


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D4n said:

I have no intention of having children for this reason.
I work with children every day, love it and would consider adopting, but having kids of your own is (sadly) a hugely selfish act.

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I can assure you that having children is definitely NOT a selfish act. They are extremely hard work and a pain in the bloody arse most of the time, not to mention the tens of thousands of pounds they cost. I only have one but he is now a typical 13 year old boy who drives me round the bend most of the time.

Just one example from the other week. He had rugby at school but decided in his wisdom to do the warm up in his coat and then play the game in his new trainers rather than his boots. Needless to say, his coat and his new trainers came back caked in mud.

I do think there is a good case to not have more than 2 children though, and I really don't see why the government should pay child benefit after the first 2. Unless you have triplets or twins on the 2nd pregnancy.

As for Veganism, I just couldn't stomach it to be perfectly honest. I try to keep my red meat intake to once or twice a week but I couldn't go completely vegetarian or vegan.

shakey said:

As for Veganism, I just couldn't stomach it to be perfectly honest. I try to keep my red meat intake to once or twice a week but I couldn't go completely vegetarian or vegan.

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The argument against going meat free is bacon. Agreed though, although we do try to have two or three vegetarian meals a week I could not go completely meat free and could certainly never go vegan! Having a nut allergy doesn't help with this either, as vegan/vegerarian dishes often utilise nuts.

shakey said:

I can assure you that having children is definitely NOT a selfish act. They are extremely hard work and a pain in the bloody arse most of the time, not to mention the tens of thousands of pounds they cost.

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I don't think anybody is saying kids aren't hard work, aren't expensive and aren't rewarding.

But... purely from an environmental perspective, every human signficantly adds to carbon emissions (10,000 kg of CO2 per year is typical in the UK). If I go vegan I reduce my CO2 by maybe 1500 kg per year. A flight from London to New York, 1600kg (3200kg return), so even if I go vegan and don't go abroad once a year, my carbon saving is still offset significantly by every new person born.

I am not saying this to be smug or suggest people without kids are somehow better than people with, nor that reducing my own carbon footprint is therefore futile. That is not my viewpoint. However it's an uncomfortable truth that more people = more carbon.

Environmental Research Letters published a journal which found that having less kids is the biggest thing you can do to help the environment, followed (a long way behind) by being car free, reducing air travel and being vegan. Conventional things we think about like recycling and using low energy bulbs don't make any significant impact.

Alsty said:

I don't think anybody is saying kids aren't hard work, aren't expensive and aren't rewarding.

But... purely from an environmental perspective, every human signficantly adds to carbon emissions (10,000 kg of CO2 per year is typical in the UK). If I go vegan I reduce my CO2 by maybe 1500 kg per year. A flight from London to New York, 1600kg (3200kg return), so even if I go vegan and don't go abroad once a year, my carbon saving is still offset significantly by every new person born.

I am not saying this to be smug or suggest people without kids are somehow better than people with, nor that reducing my own carbon footprint is therefore futile. That is not my viewpoint. However it's an uncomfortable truth that more people = more carbon.

Environmental Research Letters published a journal which found that having less kids is the biggest thing you can do to help the environment, followed (a long way behind) by being car free, reducing air travel and being vegan. Conventional things we think about like recycling and using low energy bulbs don't make any significant impact.

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Totally agree that large families are not good. The world population continues to rise and it can't keep doing so forever.

There really is no need to have more than 2 children, but unfortunately certain cultures in particular still tend to have larger families.



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Alsty said:

But... purely from an environmental perspective, every human signficantly adds to carbon emissions (10,000 kg of CO2 per year is typical in the UK). If I go vegan I reduce my CO2 by maybe 1500 kg per year. A flight from London to New York, 1600kg (3200kg return), so even if I go vegan and don't go abroad once a year, my carbon saving is still offset significantly by every new person born.

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This is important, I don't dispute the figures on the children front but I am not on the "Don't have children" bandwagon, we should be working to reduce climate change for future generations, not trying to stigmatise people opting to repeat the very thing that brought themselves into being. Having an ageing population creates a myriad of other problems - plenty of places to reference on that front.

On the wider point, the numbers matter and I would advocate there being easier ways to track your carbon footprint. The only place I ever see a x kg figure is when I use our corporate travel booking tool and that's only for trains.

Whether it be through pure virtue signalling or sheer ignorance, the number of people who drive their SUV to the airport, have a steak in departures and then jet off .... four times a year, yet painstakingly try and find produce without plastic packaging is pretty crazy.

shakey said:

I can assure you that having children is definitely NOT a selfish act. They are extremely hard work and a pain in the bloody arse most of the time, not to mention the tens of thousands of pounds they cost. I only have one but he is now a typical 13 year old boy who drives me round the bend most of the time.

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I don't think anybody here is disputing the reality of the hard work of raising children, the question is in regards to the ethics of doing so when seen through the framework of the environment. I'm with @Rick that it seems unreasonable to ask people not to procreate, but fair play to anybody who doesn't feel comfortable with it. For example, my partner likely wants one, which seems like a reasonable desire given human nature, but that also seems like a good point to stop. Just have to make sure that this hypothetical one child is absolutely flawless, making up for both my shortcomings and those of my parents. Should be fine!

Plastic Person said:

For example, my partner likely wants one, which seems like a reasonable desire given human nature, but that also seems like a good point to stop. Just have to make sure that this hypothetical one child is absolutely flawless, making up for both my shortcomings and those of my parents. Should be fine!

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Good luck with that

I have one but he is not just an only child, he is also an only grand child, so spoilt rotten.

But life is a sexually transmitted terminal disease, that is going to destroy the planet that we live on in the long run probably.
God I need a coaster.

rob666 said:

But life is a sexually transmitted terminal disease, that is going to destroy the planet that we live on in the long run probably.
God I need a coaster.

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Rob, get yourself down to Crevettes, and that's an order.

...but the dome was cleared out at the end of last season...what if Crevettes has just vanished???
Oh FY4 and Bernard.

Controversial opinion alert (I know, completely out of character for me) but I get concerned about phrases such as "climate emergency" and all the knee jerk reactions we've seen in the media and online recently.

Now before I get berated for being a climate change denier, I'm really not and I'm glad it's getting talked about. It's very real and we've just done too little about it as a world for far too long. But my concern is that we're whipping everyone into a crazed frenzy and throwing the baby out with the bath water.

A couple of examples. The first would be that insane Extinction Rebellion nonsense, where a group of people demanded such absurd things all of a sudden out of pure idealistic emotion that would have crippled the economy.

The second would be the outrageous "Dieselgate" scandle where some companies did some bad things to cheat emmisions tests. Politicians took a populist view and joined in and people suddenly had an irrational hatred of Diesels that they didn't have the year before. Did this result in a sudden change in people's driving habits? No. It led to more people going out and buying petrol cars from foreign companies, which omit more Co2 (remember the diesel controversy was about NOX emmisions, not Co2). Jaguar Land Rover have been hammered, Honda are closing their Swindon factory. More petrols sold, British manufacturing jobs lost.

Looking further back in time, the short sighted backlash from the green lobby meant we stopped the building of motorways. Now we've stopped building the safest and least environmentally damaging roads we have, we've plastered the country with thousands of miles of congested B roads instead and rammed our cities full of traffic. Or the government spending millions giving London yet another underground line with Cross Rail whilst Diesel trains are chundling around the country on lines that should really be electrified.

But to answer the question of what can we do? Well we need to start shopping sensibly. There is no need for all the plastic for instance in some of the stuff we buy and we need to send a message to the producers of those products. I don't think we recycle enough, I hate throwing anything in the bin that can be recycled. But the biggest thing we can probably do is use our votes at elections wisely to elect a government that will turn the heat up on China and India.

I think we need to slow down, think about the problem more broadly and have a better international response. I have serious doubts it'll happen though, no matter what 'ol blighty does. For the 4 decades I've been alive, we've been talking about it and although things have changed in the western world, any work is quickly undone by an emerging developing country.

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Dieselgate...Large companies lied about the performance of their vehicles for profit.
Should they not be punished for gaining an unfair advantage over the competition?
We stopped building motorways on demand because there was a realisation that every new motorway would end up congested, regardless of how many were built, because people had preferences for personal transport.
Electrification of railways can only be done on main lines, it will never be cost/carbon effective to electrify all rail lines...and give me one diesel train instead of fifty cars any day.
Climate change is here and real...I know from my lifetimes experience as a gardener...never saw a snail in my youth except on holiday, now I see literally thousands a day...warmer climate.
We need to take real steps to stop carbon emissions, starting with air leisure flights...our biggest non essential act of pollution that could be rectified overnight with taxation at realistic levels...travelling a thousand miles in the air for fifty quid is killing the planet, quickly.

The bottom line is, what ever happens to our climate, life will continue to evolve to survive, it's what has been happening for millions of years. Pre historic times, the temperatures here in the UK were around 50 degree Celsius, and during the ice age the temperatures were sub zero, there were life here on Earth despite the opposite extreme temperatures of the earth.

I remember 30 odd years ago when I was at school, there were scaremongering that the sea levels were rising and that most of Norfolk would be under water by the time I turned 50yrs. Well here I am and were are the sea levels?