Changing Attitudes: Climate Change

[SollyOlly]

 sundog fwiw, I don't think that you're ott. There's a Lot of powerful vested interests out there who will do anything to keep their power and money, and know how to bend public opinion. Combine that with people in a system where we're not encouraged to think freely...and we are where we are! 

[Methuselah]

 SollyOlly No, he has hit the nail on the head. . . I simply do not know where these denialist loons are coming from.

[sundog]

 SollyOlly yes  and they are twisting things to say that it is the climate change movement etc  that are the ones all about power and money etc. Scientists working for governments etc etc . That they want to control the people etc. Completely twisting everything around. That twisting of the truth is very dangerous. 

Edited March 24 by sundog

[SollyOlly]

 sundog totally agree, and they're expert at it. I do think /hope that deniers are going down in number, but it's still very dangerous and as the vested interests become more desperate, who knows where it will end.

[WYorksWeather]

I think psychologically the issues with persuading people of climate change and effecting the necessary changes (not just in this country but in nearly every country) are the following three things.

1. The political horizon

In short, the time horizon most politicians care about, whether elected or otherwise, is generally quite short. Two to five years is probably typical, and ten years is the threshold at which something becomes long term. Long-term, as far as most politicians are concerned, might as well be 'never'. It just doesn't register as important - there are very few politicians who care about consequences of policies 10 years hence, let alone the sort of dates we talk about in terms of climate change. Net zero by 2050 or the warming we are likely to reach by 2100 may as well be the year 3000.

2. Visibility

Most people don't pay enough attention to either the weather or to statistics to really see the impact of climate change. And even though most people in the UK do accept climate change is real, they don't really appreciate what it means. A lot of people don't realise what sort of impacts e.g. a 2-3C increase in global temperature would have on the UK - they just hear that and think 'milder winters and hotter summers, sounds pretty good to me', or at least are fairly indifferent to it. When of course it is the compounding impacts, and the tipping points and other factors, that are the big problem.

3. Distributed gains and concentrated losses

Most current climate policies will impose disproportionately large costs on small groups of people - generally either the poor who struggle with the cost of 'going green', or if there is help available, then those immediately above the threshold for government help, i.e. the squeezed middle. You also have e.g. those who may not like the idea of living near new power infrastructure - the so-called NIMBYs. In short, these people either lose or perceive themselves to lose a lot. Meanwhile, the gains of climate action are equally large, but distributed across an enormous number of people, so the per-person impact is smaller. 

What should we do?

In short, I think the communication challenges are best answered with the following. On point one, focus on the near-term goals. Far more people have heard about the need to reach net zero by 2050 than the fact that in order to have any chance of reaching that, we would need very significant emission cuts by 2030, between one third and one half.

On point two, the quality of the communication of impacts needs to get better. Not going out of our way to scare people, but temperatures getting a bit warmer doesn't really do the job.

Point three really only has two solutions. Of course in authoritarian regimes you just steamroller the opposition and tell people where to go. Obviously I'm not advocating that, so probably the only alternative is to give people a pay-out or some sort of share of the benefits.

Summary

Just floating a few ideas as to why it is such a difficult problem, and what some solutions could be. Of course, this isn't the only issue, and it's not an easy problem.

Ironically, there is a disinformation campaign and conspiracy going on, but it's not in the direction the deniers think. It's the fossil fuel industry and other related industries, following the same template used to campaign against anti-smoking laws and bans on leaded petrol, and often the same people. Initially, just deny the problem. Once denial is untenable, obfuscate and plead a lack of consensus. Once that makes you look ridiculous, emphasise the costs of change and delay it for as long as you can, and make it an absolute battle to get each bit of progress.

[Arctic Hare]

12 hours ago, WYorksWeather said:

2. Visibility

Most people don't pay enough attention to either the weather or to statistics to really see the impact of climate change. And even though most people in the UK do accept climate change is real, they don't really appreciate what it means. A lot of people don't realise what sort of impacts e.g. a 2-3C increase in global temperature would have on the UK - they just hear that and think 'milder winters and hotter summers, sounds pretty good to me', or at least are fairly indifferent to it. When of course it is the compounding impacts, and the tipping points and other factors, that are the big problem.

That was a really excellent post all round, thank you. I want to pick out this section in particular, though, as I think the focus on temperature almost above all else is indeed a big problem. When the UK hit 40 °C in July 2022, for the vast majority of people (healthy people, at least) a week later there was no discernible impact remaining and in effect it had ceased to be a visible impact. It was just "something that happened and is now over" for most of the population.

That is not the case for flooding, of course. If the river comes into your house, you're very likely to be spending months living somewhere else or even in a caravan. If the road into town is washed away, your economy is potentially in huge strife. This winter's rainfall has caused very significant problems: for example, the railway between Telford and Shrewsbury has been closed for several weeks now because of a landslip. And even on a  less dramatic level, we've all seen what months of soaking wet conditions have done to road surfaces.

The likelihood of wetter winters and more extreme rainfall events is probably what we in the UK should be emphasising more - a *lot* more - than more heatwaves in summer. The Met Office is doing that a bit more now with its comments about a warmer atmosphere holding more water. Serious rainfall/flooding is, for most people in the UK, a *far* more visible thing than a couple of extra degrees in a heatwave.

[Methuselah]

One thing that is inevitable, but not addressed by politicians, is the mass northward migration of climate refugees; if we see migration as a problem now, it's nothing to what's coming. 

I find it ironic that so many of those denying climate change are the same people who rant about immigration. How can they be so shortsighted?

[Sky Full]

 WYorksWeather  “No donation to charity will solve any major world problem by itself, so no one should donate to charity or volunteer. Politicians are elected by the votes of millions, so voting is pointless.”

I’m not sure your comparable examples of mass action versus individual inaction prove your point.  You mention two examples of people DOING something positive en-masse where the argument for NOT doing the thing is that it would make no difference to the outcome.  But the example actions you give (donating to charity or voting) are both positives and cause no harm either way.  Inaction is an easy option because no harm is directly caused by it.

The argument against trying to reduce our carbon emissions to zero is that the majority of the world’s population are NOT doing it, and our efforts alone are likely to make no difference to the climate.  The fact is that if the rest of the world were all moving towards net zero and the UK carried on as we are, our current emissions level would have no measurable impact on whether the climate continued to warm or not.   But the Net Zero policy does have a downside - it’s likely to cause long term economic harm to the majority of ordinary people in this country so in this case taking action to reduce our CO2 emissions appears to have a more dramatic negative effect than a positive one.  There is even an argument for increasing emissions in the short term so we can achieve energy generation independence especially if the future economic success of this country is considered an important factor  (I realise this is heresy but all ideas should be allowed discussion!).

If we are making strictly national policy decisions now which focus on how we think the global climate will look in 50, 60 or 70 years time we MUST also consider what the global economy, politics and migration patterns are likely to be with or without climate change.  It’s no good doing our little bit to benefit the 2070 climate if our entire industrial, economic, and societal infrastructure is unable to withstand the challenges posed by the rest of the world’s population in just 20 or 30 years….

[cheeky_monkey]

for me the problem is not climate change and the world is warming because that is a known fact because it has already happened..thus that cannot be denied. The problem is nobody knows the actual consequences on the world 50-100 years down the line because it has not happened..what we have is an educated guess on future predictions that cannot be guaranteed due to the fact that all predictions for the future the past tells us they will always be wrong  esp the further away you are from year zero.

[raz.org.rain]

 cheeky_monkey funnily enough, we've only just started to entertain the notion that a North Atlantic current collapse isn't a guarantee of regional cooling in Europe. In fact a lot of the more recent studies suggest the opposite could happen, which just adds a new level of uncertainty.

[Methuselah]

We certainly do have a problem, and powerful people are at the heart of it: 

 

[jonboy]

One issue I have in regard to the whole climate change discussions is that each element of emission is taken in isolation without a fully rounded discussion on consequence.

An example is electric cars. As a singular subject electric cars are less polluting in carbon terms that petrol or diesel in regard to emissions. However this carbon cycle needs to factor in also the degradation to our roads due to increased weight hence the need for greater/more often renewal. The additional pollution of greater tire degradation and thus greater tire wear. The need to change battery assemblies at least once in the life time of the vehicle. If you added the whole carbon cycle I am certain electric vehicles wouldn't look so attractive.   

[Methuselah]

 jonboy I agree with you, and I think the biggest problem is that, to be an MP or a Senator, politicians -- of all colours -- need absolutely no proof of their respective knowledge in order to gain the highest office. Yet, they prattle on about all sorts of things they know sod-all about! 

[overcast]

My neighbour charges his electric car from solar panels on his roof (when the sun shines) and is a 'net exporter' to the grid in the summer. All very nice if you have a large roof and 70k to spend on cars, panels and extra battery storage.

But he won't accept my (admittedly rough) calculation that his electric Polstar net emissions per mile exceeds my small petrol car on a cloudy calm day when he charges from the grid. There are so many losses to consider from a gas fired power station to energy stored in his car batteries, I still think I'm correct. 

But I still feel a 'twinge' of envy and guilt as he drives off on a warm sunny morning 

[Methuselah]

 overcast I'm not sure you are -- solar electricity is emission free, and Toyota are developing new batteries.

 

[richie3846]

What bothers me, is not the fact the climate is changing, but the assumption it's a bad thing. The earth has been a lot warmer before, and the living planet adapted with the changes. It's a great thing to reduce consumption and clean our act up, most definitely, but to turn climate change into some sort of doomsday ideology, is what really bothers me.

Because it is this way, I've had no choice but to dip out of all news and information about climate change, because it's overloaded with this thinking pattern.

[overcast]

On a cloudy calm winter morning the vehicle is charged from the grid. On such days most generated power is using fossil fuel to a steam turbine. On top of that you have grid losses , substation losses, charger losses and battery losses. Finally with the heavy batteries , the  Polstar weighs almost twice my little A1 petrol car - so suggest it is a close  call.

Of course averaged over the long-term, the electric vehicle will 'win' - until you need to replace the  battery pack ...

[Methuselah]

 overcast I get what you're saying, but my feet use even less power than your A1! 

[WYorksWeather]

 Sky Full To be fair though, I don't think it's fair to present Net Zero as an entirely negative prospect. There are potential cost savings as well - e.g. reductions in heating costs from better insulation, greater energy independence from the volatility of global gas/oil prices, etc. Of course there are costs as well - but in many cases I think these are due to poor government management - e.g. charging people to use cars but not providing adequate public transport, policies that don't have appropriate exemptions in place, and so on. Anyway I won't say much more on this as it becomes more political than climate related.

In terms of the global effect - I agree that our effect in the UK is likely to be very small - but that is our direct effect. In soft power the UK is still a top five global power due to our cultural reach and political influence, so I don't think you can calculate the effect of reducing emissions in the UK as just the direct impact alone. Can we solve the problem on our own though - no of course not.

Also worth pointing out as I have done before that even if we go down the adaptation route - the adaptation costs for e.g. 3C of warming (the 'current policies' scenario) are astronomically huge. If nothing we're doing right now matters from an emissions point of view, then we'd still need to deploy an enormous amount of money in adaptation anyway. And guess what? Most studies show we're not doing anywhere near enough adaptation, either.

[WYorksWeather]

 overcast To be fair, there are other overheads when it comes to petrol cars - the energy used to refine the petrol, and there are still some production emissions (albeit less than an EV).

The typical comparison I've seen generally shows that holding size constant, you get a ratio of 3:1 or 4:1 between petrol/diesel and electric emissions on an emissions per mile basis. Once you include lifecycle, it drops to around 2:1. Therefore, you are probably strictly right - if you compare e.g. a large electric SUV to a small petrol car, the lifecycle emissions are probably relatively similar.

I don't think that's a slam dunk against EVs though - in my view the solution is that you apply additional charges to penalise the non-business use of oversized cars. There is no good reason for the proliferation of much larger cars. As an example, in 2009 less than 10% of newly-registered cars were SUVs, now it is over 50%. People managed fine back then - the reason is purely advertising and e.g. hire purchase agreements.

There are some people I've seen who are far more radical and suggest banning them - I think that's going too far, but I think that if you're going to drive a bigger vehicle that takes up a disproportionate amount of space, causes more danger to pedestrians, and produces more emissions, you should have to pay for the privilege to compensate for the damage caused. And yes, I would apply this to electric cars as well.

[cheeky_monkey]

 WYorksWeather taxing the sheet out of stuff or banning will not work and it doesn't work..what works is making petrol cars etc obsolete through making other forms of power more efficient and less costly and we are just not there yet..IMO EV are a short term stop gap until other way more efficient modes of power generation is developed which will happen as technology advances 

[WYorksWeather]

 cheeky_monkey

I take the point that we can't ever be absolutely sure what the future consequences of climate change are likely to be. But given that temperature predictions are generally running close to the older projections (see the comparison between Exxon's internal predictions from the 1970s with modern data - the correspondence is almost exact), I don't think there's much uncertainty on that front. On the impacts, we seem to be actually running ahead of many projections - 40C in the UK was not supposed to happen until around mid-century.

In short, given that information, I don't really think we have much choice but to err on the worst-case side. Not saying we should err on the catastrophic worst-case side, but preparing for something on the worse side of predictions in terms of impact seems to make the most sense to me.

[overcast]

 WYorksWeather Yes , I think that's a fair assessment.

I'm certainly not against electric vehicles, I just wanted point out that given our current balance of electricity generation, the day-to-day running of EVs is not emission free - as many  owners would have you  believe.

Just goes to show the scale of change needed to get  there - fossil -free base-load, grid capacity and connectivity etc. etc. 

[WYorksWeather]

 cheeky_monkey This is the point though. CO2 emissions, air pollution, impacts on pedestrians, and the use of public space, are all what in economic terms are called unpriced negative externalities. To cut through the jargon, this means that they are impacts that are diffused across a large number of people, but are not included in the cost of the activity. That is where the case for taxes, disincentives or bans comes in.

To use an entirely unrelated example, take seatbelt and motorbike helmet laws. Not wearing a seatbelt or a helmet is often argued to be a victimless crime, and hence not something that the state should interfere in. But, as a society, we have decided that the wider societal impact in terms of the costs of treatment for avoidable deaths and injuries, and the trauma caused to first responders and others, alongside other reasons, means that it is justifiable to take away that choice.

The question of whether such a measure would 'work' I think is actually quite a weak argument to be honest. It might potentially be unpopular, but there'd be nothing particularly difficult to enforce about a large weight-related increase in taxation for cars, higher parking fees for SUVs, or whatever. I'm not saying you have to agree with the idea, but it strikes me as actually fairly easy to enforce.

[cheeky_monkey]

 WYorksWeather your missing the point..taxation and banning stuff doesn't work and using seat belts as an example isnt the same either..using your argument we should ban smoking and alcohol because in terms of related deaths and anti social benefits they are way higher than driving a car..prohibition didn't work because people will still find ways around it..increasing tax wont work either as people will still find ways to pay for it ..you cant force people into compliance by beating them round the head with rules and financial penalties because people will and do rebel ..then you will have the GP really push back on climate measures in a huge way...look what happened with the poll tax riots and the non payment that occurred