Henry thanks for the mention, but I’ve never tried to argue the finer points of whether or not climate change is actually happening due to human activity or not. I shared your view until not many years ago, as an Engineer, and a skeptic of the economics driving technology, I could see much justification for investments in green initiatives are actually false, driven by commercial interests.
Some simple examples are the false economics and “green-ness” of things like expensive electronic LED lamps being used to replace cheap simple filament lamps, and economy ratings on washing machines, which had to ditch efficient external hot water feeds, so as to heat only cold water ineficiently within the machines, in order that such ratings could be made testable.
Those things are now mandatory in Europe due to stakeholders in the manufacturers of the items lobbying, using “green” arguments beyond technical questioning by non Engineer polititians, most of whom would have been convinced to go out and buy some shares in the corresponding companies, sensing some serious profits to be made.
I believe such deceiving commercial interests very much exist also in the carbon arguments.
Further, I have real doubts as to the actual rises in sea levels we might see if, or when all of the ice-caps have melted. I believe there may be counter-active planetary thermodynamic effects, which no-one can, or wishes to, try to predict.
All of which blurs the issue.
Which I think is what you are saying also, just with different words.
Where we maybe differ is that I choose to believe there is an existential global pollution problem, whereas you appear to choose otherwise.
I believe it because there is overwhelming, other, inarguable evidence.
We know multitudes of species of living things are dying all around us, both on land, and in the oceans.
We know our environment is becoming poisoned, toxic to life, including ours. We have increasing rates of cancer and other serious illnesses which are directly linked. We analyse the toxic waste and see that it is mostly plastic, manufactured intentionally or unintentionally from fossil fuels.
Finally, we look at the simple energy economics.
We see that the energy requirements of a still growing technological human population grows even faster than the increase in population itself.
We see that we still supply most of that energy from fossil fuels, or other finite resources, extracted from the Earth and converted to pollution at much expense, though some are blinded by short term profit.
So it absolutely is unsustainable, no matter how clever we get with carbon, or even plastic recycling technologies.
The energy we use has to come from somewhere, and there is only one source of energy, our sun.
When do we admit that as long as we continue to draw energy from Earth stored energy resources, such as fossil fuels, we are actually dying, by our own hand? Further, this goes hand in hand with global inequality.
Energy equates more or less to wealth.
We have burned most of our stored energy resources in about 150 years.
Thus our planet, and we, are not richer at all. We are actually poorer. This is the real reason we have so much poverty. There might seem a lot of billionaires, but their short term spending power actually masks the fact that the total pot of wealth available to us is less than it was before we burned the energy reserves.
So I argue we, all of us should be investing in industrial scale solar power worldwide, without further delay.
After that is solved, in the only way possible, we will have infinite energy and thus infinite wealth for all people.
Pretty simple really.
