I mean, private emissions, I heard, are insignificant compared to industrial. But then, industry exists because, in the end, we consume stuff. Right?
I'm sincerely hoping for someone who I can trust to explain to me how I'm making the world a worse place by purchasing, let's say, a car, and that as if I'm a 5-year-old. Not because I'm easily bored, but because (I accept,) I'm still ignorant and I need to start from the beginning.
A meteorologist (I just googled "scientist who studies weather", not a native speaker here) telling me "hey, the temperatures will increase by X degrees and the sea level will increase by X meters so... we are doomed" makes me want to do something but I can't even begin to predict the effects.
Also there are these false data generated by (IMHO, crazy) deniers but while easy to catch on its own, they have this side effect of creating many false positives while trying to identify fake data in this ocean called the internet.
http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/
TL;DR: better energy production/transportation methods, data-driven tools for finding bottle necks in production systems, information distribution for infrastructure and coordination and energy demand, making better tools to collect, analyze, present, and change minds.
Basically the same talent and sweat we put into getting 1% more click through rate to put on the slide deck for the next VC funding pitch, except, you know, put towards not having our grandkids die. You know, that kind of stuff.
"If any 'founders' out there want to 'disrupt' our 401 ppm atmospheric CO2, or 'moonshot' ocean acidification, that would be cool"
"minimum viable planet"
One person on their own can only do so much, so on a personal level "buy as little as you can while staying happy" (or "save as much as you can and retire early") are good things. These are good for individuals even if we are wrong about climate change.
Cars, for example: When you buy a car, the car maker realises there is demand for cars and makes more cars. If you buy cars less often, they makes less of them, putting less CO2 into the air.
Your English is good, by the way. While "meteorologist" is a scientist who studies weather, and "climatologist" is a scientist who studies the climate, even many native speakers get "weather" and "climate" mixed up.
I don't follow global warming goes, but I believe the argument goes: the more CO2 there is in the atmosphere, the more people will die, and the more we consume, the more CO2 will be in the atmosphere...
https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=global%20warming...
Numbers are a bit all over the place.
Everyone is telling me to do this and that, and that it's important. No one seems to be talking about the impact.
Being a software-developer, I know there is a limit to how much you can dumb-down the things. I probably wouldn't be able to explain two's complement to a five-year-old. But, I see the importance of the issue and we need to begin somewhere.
Unfortunately the biggest impacts you can have are to stop flying, and stop driving a car, the suggestion of which many people don't react well to.
Getting people to eat less meat or meat from less worse emitters or upgrading existing buildings to low emissions for heating does not seem that much easier.
Anyway, you can't fix the problem with a single change.
Political agitation moves the Overton Window [1], if you sit back and wait, nothing will happen.
That said, you will need a plan on how a billion Indians can have a fridge and an indoor cooker without impact.
Of course you can't save the planet alone. However, researchers did the math and found every ton of CO2 eliminates 3m² of Arctic sea ice. Multiply this with average sea ice thickness (>1m) and start to take care of your personal block of sea ice.
DOI: 10.1126/science.aag2345
Edit: 102 US gallons, which are different from UK gallons.
Saving the climate should become a sport.
[1]: https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2016-05/global_em...
Generations of people saying what you said got us here. Don't you wish they had thought and acted differently?
This is a standard collective action problem. Haranguing people who point that out doesn't solve the problem.
Next up (in whatever order makes more financial sense, probably): electric vehicle, heat pump.
More difficult to change: less flights, less meat for our family.
What about you? :)
Glad you asked:
I am in the middle of a year (to start) without flying. Most people when I ask the last time they went 365 without flying say decades. That was the case for me. I'm learning that flying and happiness have zero correlation.
Haven't eaten meat since 1999, and maybe a few pounds of animal products in the past decade.
Haven't owned a car since 1988.
I live in Manhattan and take maybe 2 or 3 taxi rides a year. I'm even taking the subway and bus less in favor of walking.
Avoid food with packaging, mostly buying from farmers markets and a CSA, to where I empty my landfill garbage 3 or 4 times per year.
Write about these things, mostly on my blog (for example: http://joshuaspodek.com/avoiding-food-packaging or http://joshuaspodek.com/cheetah-extinction-earths-carrying and related links within), and starting to in my Inc. column (for example: http://www.inc.com/joshua-spodek/leonardo-dicaprio-martin-sc...)
Generally avoiding accumulating less stuff.
Developing relations with people at Columbia's earth science departments to see about developing leadership courses there to help the people most knowledgeable about the science to become more influential.
- rendering too much on client devices
- embedding too many other websites in websites
- slow manual updates that could be automatic background tasks
- keeping devices awake by phoning home excessively
Everyone seems to want to wait for government regulation or something to change other people's behavior. Governments will follow what voters do.