If we can't agree on what the cause is, how can we agree on what to do about it?

Well, there's cause and there's cause.

If you have a smoke problem you can put the fire out without working out how it started.

The smoke problem is at the end of a long web of causes and effects.

It is not possible to put out sufficiently large fires.

We need to act earlier in the causal chain. But where? And who pays?

Do we know areas at risk of uncontrollable fires?

Yes?

Do we know how to mitigate the risks?

>Yes? Do the things.

>No? Pay the experts to figure this out. Draft them if need be.

No? Pay the experts to figure this out. Draft them if need be.

Everyone pays proportionally. Nationalize assets if need be.

We have the knowledge, resources, and capacity to solve these problems. (Change my mind). We lack leaders with the spine to take necessary action.

If everyone agrees that the fire is causing the smoke and needs to be put out, we can do that.

The problem here is that we have a bunch of smoke, and a good chunk of the population is either saying that there's no smoke or that the smoke is unrelated to the fire.

How do you fix the smoke problem if you can't get enough people to agree to put out the fire?

Effective solutions to problems do not always depend on knowing the cause.

Climate change seems to be one of the problems where acknowledging the cause is key to solving the problem. The only viable solutions we have right now involve mitigating the cause.

This is a great point, there were many gravity powered devices before we had a good understanding of how or why gravity worked.

We would have to shut down 90% of the pollutants world wide to do anything. Will make the Covid shutdowns look like a long weekend. And even then it might not make a difference if climate change is out of our control. You willing to do that?

"We would have to shut down 90% of the pollutants world wide to do anything."

This is vastly overestimated and straight up poorly informed statistics. There are dozens of solutions for pollution that involve energy efficiency, which doesn't require a single shut down and merely uses what we're already consuming more efficiently (think gasoline standards, heating, A/C, LEDs, insulation, weatherization, etc).

Alongside these simple and job-intensive efficiency gains, we can encourage the already massive growth in wind, solar, batteries, EVs, and other clean industries, which will vastly reduce the number of pollutants without shutdowns needed.

If we apply smart stimulus for Corona to encourage the many green tech jobs, we will see huge benefits on air pollution alone, never mind long-term climate impacts. Even if you think climate is a hoax, pollution certainly isn't and it's killing poor people by the hundreds of thousands every year. We have the solutions above, let's implement them, not throw up our hands in despair.

I agree that ‘better’ is worth doing and we could wait forever for ‘perfect’ to come along while the world burns.

However even doing these things won’t return the biosphere to it’s previous condition, we’ve extracted extreme quantities of energy from underground and dumped them into the atmosphere, and our ‘locked in’ climate change will not decrease with those measures alone. We need to restore balance and I can’t see a way of doing it short of significant carbon sequestration - vastly beyond what can be achieved by reforestation.

Making them sufficiently efficient to solve the problem WILL NECCESSARILY involve a tear down and rebuild with the efficient replacement. There are millions of small cook fires that aggregate to a large part of the problem. House insulation, electrify cooking, heating, transportation of all kinds will take 50-100 years to fully implement - We have to do all these things ASAP.

Yup, because in the mid-term, the alternative is basically the same anyway.

I don’t want to be uncharitable, but I can’t help reading your comment as, “we shouldn’t be inconvenienced to prevent ours and our children’s suffering.” That can’t be a correct reading, can it?

Given that some 35% of global emissions this century have come from such unnecessary atrocities as the War on Terror[1] I am confident we have a good starting point for things to cut.

[1] https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/papers/20...

This statement is hyperbolic and unhelpful at best. The citizens of countries all over the world have indicated, en masse, they are willing to make drastic changes. Their governments are either slow to react or beholden to the financial interests of the worst offenders.

Wipe out 90% of pollutants or wipe out 90% of humans in a mass die off. The animals (except for rats and raccoons) will rejoice but I don’t think that’s what humans want.

Yes. I prefer this planet in its habitable state.

Fred, Sooner or later the warming will force us to implement these extreme measures, even thiugh they need to be implemented ASAP.

"Not killing the planet would be too expensive."