There is so much to worry about these days, I don’t know where to start and what to do. Some examples

- plastic waste, they found micro plastic in artic snow, WTF

- topsoil depletion, we are going to be so many more people, we’ll need food, at the same time we lose fertile land continuously

- groundwater depletion, many dry countries export water in the form of food. What happens when there is nothing left?

Global warming? Yes that too...

We need to prioritize.

Frankly, microplastics issue can be dealt with later. We don't know whether and what effects they have on organisms; we're just worried about suddenly finding them everywhere. The effects might turn out to exist and be damaging, but if they were catastrophic, we'd most likely notice it by now. Mitigation efforts are warranted, but IMO should be deprioritized.

Topsoil depletion, groundwater depletion and global warming all contribute towards the same ultimate problem: less of hospitable/habitable places on the planet -> less food, water and living space -> lots of suffering and increasing economic tensions -> war -> collapse of technological civilization. Multiple problems contribute to the same bad outcome, and mitigating them should be a #1 global priority right now.

Point is: with technology - which requires a working economy - we can mitigate most inconveniences to life. We can deal with slightly broken ecosystem, and we could eventually repair it (if only as costs-saving measure). But if that economy - and I can't believe I'm saying this, that the economy is most important; but I guess this is how growing up looks like - if that economy breaks down, due to hardships of living ending up in war, we all lose. Our civilization at this point in development is extremely fragile, and advanced technology has a half-life measured in weeks. So it's most important to solve first the problems threatening our very ability to solve problems.

Cool. I like your approach? Since we’re at it: what about mass extinction of species? Same priority?

Our species? Obviously top. Other species? How important they are to our survival and (secondarily) our quality of life?

Note that from this point of view, you arrive at some measure of environmentalism. Solving climate change is much more important than random animal or plant species. But preservation of species is very important too, for reasons like ecosystem stability (we wouldn't want to stress nature too much or have a linchpin species go extinct, and make the planet less habitable in the process), drug research, food supply stability, and ultimately also aesthetic reasons.

So: climate change >> mass extinction >> occasional extinction. Microplastics I'd tentatively put between mass and occasional extinction, but proper placement depends on the outcome of further research.

I understand the implications of this question, but why do we prioritize self-preservation over all else?

Like, I get that's a biological instinct, but at some point it has to be not worth it to save ourselves. If we're making value judgments for everything else, it's simply wrong to ignore ourselves.

> I don’t know where to start and what to do

You don't do it, your government does, through law, regulation, and policy. You just need to vote for the ones who will implement those and protest those that refuse.

Indeed there are so many things one could be concerned about..

- An asteroid could wipe out all life on Earth. - The supervolcano known as Yellowstone might erupt. Again. - Supernova gamma ray burst might hit the planet, sterilising it (and us). - A massive and catastrophic solar flare hitting Earth. - If Carl Sagan is correct, and extra-terrestrial intelligent life does exist, and they turn out to be belligerant, Earth could be attacked. - A global pandemic caused by some super-disease suddenly emerging.

And this is 100% going to happen: our own life-giving star, Sol, WILL destroy the planet in a few billion years time.

Also 100% going to happen; you will die at some point between now and the next 70 or less years, depending on your age, genetics, health, propensity for dangerous sports or activites, whether you look out for fast moving vehicles whilst crossing the road, whether or not an aircraft falls on you.

And so on.

Of course, we humans should try and keep Spaceship Earth in good running condition. Finding ways of reducing waste and keeping our environment clean and healthy is of utmost importance.

As for Global Warming?

This is where I trigger potential downvotes - please don't do this just because I might disagree with you, it's just not cricket old bean.

I am yet to be convinced that human beings are the main cause of Global Warming. This has, despite any protestations to the contrary, not been proven. Global Warming theory is still just a theory, and just to head this one off at the pass, no, pointing out that "gravity is also just a theory" is a fallacious argument.

I am yet to be convinced human beings are responsible for a changing global climate. Global Climate Change is a thing, yes, and that climate has been changing since the formation of planet Earth 4.54 ± 0.05 billion years ago. I don't think humans can possibly affect this planet in terms of /global/ Climate Change in any measurable magnitude. There are forces which affect and cause /global/ Climate Change which are vastly more powerful than us mere humans.

Humans can affect their local climate for sure - a city has a different local climate compared to an equivalent area of wildland. All that tarmac and concrete does have an effect locally. But to suggest that the human race - which inhabits a small percentage of the landcover of a planet of which two thirds of its surface is water - is the main cause of Climate Change, reeks of hubris and agenda.

The best thing we humans can do is to put things into perspective, deal with a dynamic, ever-changing global climate which is out of our control, try our best to keep the place tidy - we do need more effort on that front - do what we humans are great at doing which is coming up with great and new technologies (I'm looking at you, fusion power to be a workable thing within my lifetime!), and make the most of our individual limited time on this Earth by following your aspirations and fulfilling your potential.

We know that humans are responsible for the large increase in greenhouse gases over the last few decades, because greenhouse gases from most non-human sources have different isotope ratios than those we produce, and the non-human sources that do look the same as human sources from an isotope ratio viewpoint can be spotted and monitored and accounted for from satellites.

So unless you are disputing that a large worldwide increase in greenhouse gas concentration in the atmosphere affects climate, your position that humans can't affect global climate is untenable.

I don't want to downvote you but you cannot ask us to believe your intimate conviction versus the scientific community.

You have listed discrete events that either happen or they don't. If they are avoided then it is as if they never happened in the first place. Global warming isn't like that. Once it has started you can still stop it but you can never go back to the way it was before.

Global warming is like having cancer. You go to the doctor( or scientist), you check if you have cancer (or global warming), he tells you yes you indeed have cancer and only 5 years of life left (a few decades with global warming) and if you get treated right away they might even prevent the cancer from spreading and you will have a good chance of growing old and dying in your 80s. Except you are stingy and don't want to pay the (very cheap) bill. 3 years later you are bedridden and the bill has quadrupled.

Also if you think climate change wasn't accelerated by humans then please take a look at this nice chart. https://xkcd.com/1732/

> Indeed there are so many things one could be concerned about..

> - An asteroid could wipe out all life on Earth. - The supervolcano known as Yellowstone might erupt. Again. - Supernova gamma ray burst might hit the planet, sterilising it (and us). - A massive and catastrophic solar flare hitting Earth. - If Carl Sagan is correct, and extra-terrestrial intelligent life does exist, and they turn out to be belligerant, Earth could be attacked. - A global pandemic caused by some super-disease suddenly emerging.

True, all of these things are out of our control and also not currently happening. Climate change is and we can also do something about it.

> And this is 100% going to happen: our own life-giving star, Sol, WILL destroy the planet in a few billion years time.

Ehh sure, this and the above paragraph are prime examples of what-aboutism. This is generally not useful for solving problems.

> I am yet to be convinced human beings are responsible for a changing global climate. Global Climate Change is a thing, yes, and that climate has been changing since the formation of planet Earth 4.54 ± 0.05 billion years ago.

Yes the climate has been changing. It generally did not change at the rate we're seeing now. It might not be manmade but that would make timing (right after the industrial revolution, coal power plants, plastic, etc that all happened at a __very__ large scale recently) a huge coincidence.

I don't think humans can possibly affect this planet in terms of /global/ Climate Change in any measurable magnitude. There are forces which affect and cause /global/ Climate Change which are vastly more powerful than us mere humans.

Maybe it helps to think about it like that; Humans aren't changing the climate - you're right. But corporations are doing it to satisfy human demand. While corporations are run by us they exhibit vastly different behavior as well as operating at a completely different scale than us.

> Humans can affect their local climate for sure - a city has a different local climate compared to an equivalent area of wildland. All that tarmac and concrete does have an effect locally. But to suggest that the human race - which inhabits a small percentage of the landcover of a planet of which two thirds of its surface is water - is the main cause of Climate Change, reeks of hubris and agenda.

We use most of that land cover for agriculture and changing it by deforestation etc. The water parts of earth are.. Well I don't really see your point there. 1/3 is a looot of area to affect, surely enough to change the climate by a tiny bit (2 deg) which then causes runaway effects. It throws the system off balance.

> The best thing we humans can do is to put things into perspective, deal with a dynamic, ever-changing global climate which is out of our control, try our best to keep the place tidy - we do need more effort on that front - do what we humans are great at doing which is coming up with great and new technologies (I'm looking at you, fusion power to be a workable thing within my lifetime!), and make the most of our individual limited time on this Earth by following your aspirations and fulfilling your potential.

I think you're right here. In the end it doesn't after what causes climate change anyway - it is happening and it is killing us so we need to do something about it. Thing is, if we don't know the cause for these extreme rates this will be hard. Humans seem like a very likely cause here and the specific sources (e.g. coal, flying) are conveniently in our control. So even if you're still not sure, acting as if we're the cause is a good action plan, don't you think?

> it is happening and it is killing us

While the "it is happening" part has good amount of supporting data and is almost certainly true, the killing us part is much more questionable, most predictions agree that if we do nothing it will cause <10% gdp loss in 2100 compared to the scenario where it did not happen. So we need to make sure that whatever we do to prevent climate change doesn't cause more economic loss than climate change itself, and mostly invest in developing new technology and helping poor countries to become richer.

Thought experiment: tomorrow we delete the countries of Africa. Literally gone, the continent ceases to exist.

Maybe we keep SA and the northern bits like Tunisia etc.

Global GDP probably declines less than 10%, right?

You can't reduce everything to money in these terms.

That's a very important point, and i should have mentioned it in my comment. In 100 years the poor countries will be much richer, and we have opportunity to help improve their situation sooner which in turn would help everyone by making markets larger and increasing the number of people working on science. In some cases helping this countries directly will have more effect than wasting money on biofuel subsidies. Bjørn Lomborg have many interesting talks/writings about this issue.

Have you heard about how much worse paper straws are to the environment than plastic?

What about that Africa is the leader in pollution into the oceans . It's amazing how much disinformation is out there regarding plastic and the source.

> What about that Africa is the leader in pollution into the oceans .

Please can you support this with a cite, because I think you've misunderstood what you've read.

Plastic in the ocean comes from roughly 3 sources.

1) Microfibres in clothing. It's likely that the West dumps significantly more of these into the environment because of greater numbers of plastic clothing and increased amounts of washing of those clothes.

2) industrial equipment, mostly lost fishing nets. I haven't seen anything that says these nets are disproportionately from African boats.

3) plastics from sewage systems, and plastics washed from land into rivers and thus into the ocean.

It's this last one that I think you're talking about. But it's important to realise that 1) many of these rivers aren't in Africa, but in Asia and 2) most of that plastic was exported from the West to Asia.

1] Microfibres in clothing was tested upstream of sewage treatment. Sewage treatment plants and septic fields both remove solids from wastewater. It’s only in areas without either that all of these micro plastics can reach the ocean.

2) Fishing nets are a common issue, but make a low percentage of micro plastic waste to reach the ocean. (Though they are a significant percentage of all plastic in the ocean.)

3) This is the main issue, but anti littering laws and sewage treatment make a huge difference in output. This means South America, Indonesia, and yes Africa are disproportionately causing micro plastic pollution.

Sewage farms do not remove all microplastics.

https://wwtonline.co.uk/features/microplastics-plastics-plas...

> Domestic and commercial wastewater is certainly a major route for microplastics entering the environment – but by no means the exclusive one. When comparing the samples upstream of the wastewater treatment plants with those downstream, the Leeds study found that all of the plants were linked to an increase in microplastics in the rivers – on average up to three times higher, but in one instance by a factor of 69.

The large volume means that even reducing 95% of all microplastic will still be releasing large numbers of microplastic. And because it's a waste water treatment plant these microplastics are going to be heavily contaminated with bioavailable pollutants -- these are higher risk microplastics.

We currently don't know how well wastewater treatment plants remove microplastics. We do know that some of them will be releasing hundreds of microplastics per cubic metre.

I did not say they removed all of the micro plastics. I said, without them all would be released.

> even reducing 95% of all microplastic

Yea, no scale matters. Micro plastics where only detected on the world’s oceans in 2004, they are an issue but far from the most critical one facing the world’s oceans.

> We currently don’t know how well wastewater treatment

Sure, but this is still a massive issue with the study. If they are say 50% vs 99.9% effective that’s a big deal.

It's primarily from rivers that run through Asia and Africa.

https://www.acsh.org/news/2018/07/26/asia-africa-cause-90-pl...

Come see the once pristine beaches of Bali during wet season. Plastic is a huge environmental problem (one of many).

> Have you heard about how much worse paper straws are to the environment than plastic?

I'd like to read more about that, have you got a link? Full disclosure: I hate paper straws, they turn into mush too fast and kids can't deal with them at all.

Apparently the material they're made of makes them too hard to recycle.

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-49234054

Who mentioned straws?

Great example of Whataboutism

I can see what you're on about but the issue is we're banning plastics in favor for something that's even worse. We'd be better off using plastic than paper.

I'm not disagreeing there is a problem but our solutions are pretty bad.

What if we painted the mountain white instead?

Well, due to dust, they won't stay white for long. Good thing about snow / glaciers is they are repainted every week! Doing it for entire mountains manually would be unrealistic.

At this point, if you want to play with geoengineering, dispersing particulates into upper atmosphere and placing Sun shields in high orbit would probably be a better idea.

Using hot air balloons as sun shades would be much cheaper than satellites in high orbit. And balloons would give more flexibility as they can be used to heat the air above clouds and disperse them when needed. But most importantly they can be used to improve actual weather, so even the people that are not interested in abstract climate change would support them.

Check how big Greenland and the Arctic are. You'd need a lot of paint.

It's naive to say a 'country' is responsible for this. In the end, people like you and me have to decide what the future is going to look like.

But who has time or integrity to stand up against things like climate change, right?

Respectfully but very firmly disagree. It’s the role of nation-state actors to protect against exactly things like this (tragedy of the commons) where everyone is individually incentivized to act against the common good.

Every nation is also individually incentivized to act against the common good of all nations.

The difference is that nations can meaningfully negotiate with each other.

Individuals don't really have a way of widespread negotiation other than elected representatives.

Being a leader in technology that the whole world has to deploy in the next twenty years can be an advantage.

Which is ostensibly why things like the (laughably impotent) UN exist.

Yes and no. Nation states resolve coordination problems of their citizens. But while being (somewhat) coordinated within, they're still in regular competition with each other. To get nation states to not themselves fall into geopolitical tragedies of the commons, you'd need a global government above all nations.

The only people who have enough power to solve the problem are the leaders of a handful of countries.

So, while obviously only people can solve the problem, it's only a select few people that actually can do anything about it. You or I have no more power than that which democracy affords us.

In the end, it will be the individual who makes the final decision. And we are going to decide to be comfortable now, rather than save the current state of the planet for future generations.

I am a pick-up-the-litter kind of guy, but I am not going to do without air conditioning.

Leanardo DiCaprio feels passionately about climate change, but he's not giving up his private jet flights.

Barack Obama feels strongly too, but he's not going to give up yacht vacations.

Human nature dictates the final result. Perhaps we'd better devote our energies towards ways to deal with the inevitable. Because nobody's going to voluntarily live 100 years in the past for the benefit of those 100 years in the future.

Only 100 companies are responsible for 71% of global emissions[1]. Individual decisions have such a vanishingly small impact on the environment that it's actually counter-productive to make this type of argument.

People have a limited amount of time to spend on different aspects of their lives. If you dedicate all of your "saving the planet" time to minor personal changes, you won't have the time to do what is actually necessary -- push for political change which will actually address the problem. Yes, you aren't saying "don't try to solve the bigger problem (lack of action by governments)" but you are saying "focus on the smaller problems (what type of laundry liquid you use)" -- which would inevitably result in the bigger problems being neglected by most people.

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/jul/10...

The 100 companies include Shell, BP, Chevron, etc.

They are only producing the means for abusing the environment-- it's the end users that are doing the damage.

I suppose you could argue that if we outlawed petroleum production that it wouldn't allow the abusers anything to work with, but it would also deny the world of most of the progress made in the last 150 years.

> You or I have no more power than that which democracy affords us.

Which is very good in many ways, one of which being that we get scared too easily from headlines and tend to forget about many other pressing issues that all have to be taken care of all the time.

The only people who have enough power to solve the problem are the people building better technology. If you can't replace gasoline with something equally affordable, people will not accept it.

Most leaders - at least in democratic countries - don't actually have a lot of power to do things that the people don't want them to do. Just look at Macron attempting to raise taxes on gasoline. He wishes he had approval ratings as "good" as those of Donald Trump. People are rioting in the streets.

Now perhaps if you have a really wealthy country like Norway, you can afford to subsidize electric vehicles or renewable energy. The same won't work for other countries, especially emerging economies.

> The only people who have enough power to solve the problem are the people building better technology.

Not building. Funding. The problem with technological solutions to global problems isn't lack of technology, or science. It's lack of funding for R&D, deployment and maintenance.

Politicians are the ones who decide for or against a carbon tax. Politicians also decide laws where you can put wind turbines and solar panels, whether to build roads or rails, whether to allow buildings without insulation and with fossil fuel heating.

If I did everything I reasonably could I might be able to produce a third of the carbon footprint of an average citizen of my country, it's literally impossible for me to go down to zero without living as a hunter-gatherer in the woods. The hunter-gatherer lifestyle doesn't feed eight billion people, so not even that is a scaleable solution.

> Politicians are the ones who decide for or against a carbon tax. Politicians also decide laws where you can put wind turbines and solar panels, whether to build roads or rails, whether to allow buildings without insulation and with fossil fuel heating.

And politicians do some mix of what they personally believe is right and what will get them re-elected— When political leaders try to make big changes without the support of the populace, the result is generally bad. The question then turns to how to increase popular support for actually taking governmental action on climate change.

Perhaps if you became a politician you would get their perspective.

If I became a politician today it would certainly take me more than ten years before I got anywhere further than my local council. By then we already used up our carbon budget.

"You mean, it comes from a world of lizards?" "No," said Ford, who by this time was a little more rational and coherent than he had been, having finally had the coffee forced down him, "nothing so simple. Nothing anything like so straightforward. On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people." "Odd," said Arthur, "I thought you said it was a democracy." "I did," said Ford. "It is." "So," said Arthur, hoping he wasn't sounding ridiculously obtuse, "why don't people get rid of the lizards?" "It honestly doesn't occur to them," said Ford. "They've all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they've voted in more or less approximates to the government they want." "You mean they actually vote for the lizards?" "Oh yes," said Ford with a shrug, "of course." "But," said Arthur, going for the big one again, "why?" "Because if they didn't vote for a lizard," said Ford, "the wrong lizard might get in.

Things like zoning, light rail, solar and wind allowance are all very local politics. Your local council is where the change is needed.

You are blaming the politicians who apparently took the “ten years” before they got anywhere for making whatever choices they think best reflect their intents. Yet you do not wish to do the same.

So? I also blame people dumping toxic waste in rivers and yet I don't want to become the boss of a chemical plant.

It is the responsibility of all countries, of course. The problem is that the countries most willing to do something are also the ones with the least influence over the matter. On a global scale Iceland for example can do very little to offset the trends. It takes the buy-in from the biggest countries before something meaningful can happen.