It needs to be said, that sugar coating the truth of climate change isn’t helping anyone except maybe short-term political expediency.
It bugs me when political leaders refuse to talk about climate change or acknowledge that humans are changing the climate, because only a stupid person would fail to acknowledge such an obvious fact. Every day when I look at the weather records, we are consistently above historical averages, and record breaking cold is almost unheard of these days. Almost all the cold records are 100 plus years old.
I understand the climate change activists are obnoxious people, advocating unrealistic goals, hoping for near ideal outcomes. Sure an ideal goal for not cooking the planet would be an emissions cut of 80% over 1990 levels, which conveniently now is described as keeping the yearly global average climate within 2 degrees Celsius or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit temperatures that were averaged out in the 20th century.
That would be ideal. Such levels have been judged to minimize serious damage to the earth’s climate, even though any realistic person knows that wouldn’t be possible without an impractical or generally undesirable crash diet on humanity’s use of carbon for energy and all other purposes. Renewables offer a lot of promise, but they aren’t a stand-in for our high levels energy consumption we get from fossil fuels. Even if we could make nuclear safe, it would bankrupt society before we ever made much of a dent in the climate.
If you were to eat a controlled food ration every day of year and never smoked, drank alcohol, or went out in town on Friday night, you could probably live a lot longer. You would be a lot healthier for sure. But we don’t live in such a world, but do make informed choices in our diet and lifestyle choices, and realize life is a compromise that you make. It’s not a bad idea to eat a little more broccoli, choose to not smoke, consume alcohol in moderation, exercise and not party too hard. But it would suck to give up on all that is fun and good in life. No cookies, no alcohol ever?
Reasonable adults would come to the table and weight the pros and cons of addressing climate change to different extents. There should be an informed dialog, one where we as a society get together and come to a consensus on what would be an appropriate amount of change – and not just an theoretically ideal number. We should harden our communities against obvious storm threats, like increased flooding and sea rise, as the climate gets warmer. We should take reasonable steps, like investment in roof-top solar and wind turbines and replacing old coal and nuclear plants with modern, efficient gas peaking and mid-load plants. We should be designing automobiles to be efficient while serving the purposes of their owners.
There are cost-effective solutions that would allow for economic growth, while ensuring people are comfortable and can do much what they currently do today. Climate change action should be about moderation not extremism, and should address the serious threats while balancing our contemporary needs.