Fossil fuels aren’t evil, and half a trillion dollars is hundreds of billions less than the annual US defense budget, just for a comparison.
I don’t see why conflicts of interest are not worth pointing out. When someone is hired by an oil company and they start spreading misinformation the connections are rather hard to ignore.
Burying our heads in the sand won’t fix it.
How many tons of CO2 have been kept from entering the atmosphere due to green technologies?
That is irrelevant as whether we spend too much on the military and national defense or not is a separate issue. A half trillion dollars is a half trillion dollars. What we spend elsewhere does not logically change that.
You would be silly not to point out conflicts of interest. But with the big business of climate change they go both ways now. And again, conflicts of interest are pointed out by client deniers in regards to the consensus but they are summarily dismissed (can’t really get funding or research if you don’t tote the global climate change punchline). My point is that I don’t like such intellectual inconsistency and dishonesty, not that one shouldn’t actually vet their sources or make sure they are credentialed.
Not nearly enough to justify its cost. Don’t forget the CO2 downpayment needed on actually creating Green technology as well. Acquiring the needed materials and creating them usually requires fossil fuels in the chain in many places. We are not stopping global climate change. Some are trying to slow it down 100 years from now. I’m not looking that far ahead to be honest. Too much uncertainty as I suspect the world will be radically different at that time.
Vinnie
You are of the opinion that it shouldn’t be spent on fixing climate change. You would rather stick your head in the sand and not hear anything about it. Noted.
What misinformation are you claiming they are spreading?
What conflict of interest do the research scientists have? In many cases they are funded by government grants, not by any industry.
Again, your opinion is noted. You would rather do nothing and stick your head in the sand.
Please give some examples with the names of atmospheric scientists and their research proposals.
One fresh paper shows how even relatively small rises in the average temperature have strong effects on the number of heathwave days:
A rise from +0.5 C to +2 C global average temperature increases the number of heathwave days 3-4-fold in northern Europe and >6-fold in southern Europe. In southern Europe, an extreme heathwave event (occurs once in a century at +0.5 C) has an annual probability of 60% at +2 C. This is serious because +2 C is a realistic future temperature - the goal to stay below +1.5 C has already been practically lost as the CO2 emissions have not declined as much as needed.
The deteriorating situation is already reality. Spain has asked emergency aid from the EU because the agriculture is suffering from the hardest drought in a century. Part of farmers do not even sow seeds during this year because of the situation. In the future, the situation is expected to become worse. I guess that a similar situation is or will be reality in other comparable regions, such as California.
Any actions that will reduce the rise of temperatures with even as little as +0.5-1 degrees from the projected future temperatures will help much.
I have not. I’ll google it though and see if I can find it right after posting this.
I watched a 22 second long video by a channel called Waterbear that had a short funny video about greenwashing with hamsters.
That was probably the trailer you saw.
waterbear.com has many excellent films about environmental / human rights issues.
Some excellent ones are “Just Eat it” and “The Last of us”
There have been multiple wildfires within the last two years in Nebraska – the state where I live, some this spring already, as well as two flooding disasters in 2019 that made national if not global headlines. This past April, planting season, was the second driest since records have been kept (128 years).
Public and commercial interest has focused so far on the carbon footprint, how much CO2 is produced. That starts to be oldfashioned. In the near future, companies will probably adopt the ‘nature footprint’ that measures global environmental impacts more accurately. The methods how this footprint should be calculated are still developing but the work is progressing.
In a method I saw, the formula takes into account the use of land, use of water, climate change and pollution, use of natural resources and effects on the spread of alien species. Maybe there was also something else, I do not remember.
It was interesting to see preliminary results calculated for the products that local grocery stores are selling. You could see from the calculations how each product group affected seas, fresh waters and land ecosystems. The geographical region where the product was produced affected the values - different values for agricultural products cultivated in Brazil, USA and Europe.
The value the formula produced was ‘extinction equivalent’, how much the production will increase the probability that a species goes to extinction.
An interesting point was also that the demand for this index came from commercial companies. Development of the index was partly funded by a big grocery shop chain that wanted to get nature footprints for the products they are selling.
The Marshall Islands are already going under and they are desperate.
Fire Season has started very early in Alberta, Canada. As a matter of fact, smoke from Canadian Wildfires is causing hazy skies in much of the Northeastern US.
There needs to be another icon besides the 
to choose from. In this case, 
might be appropriate.
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