Quote:
Originally Posted by Natalya
@redpoint5:
I've seen you say as much before, "it's real but we can't do much, and there's more pressing problems we can more easily solve with less money anyway." What are your thoughts on problems that climate change is indirectly causing?
For example, changing weather patterns leads to unpredictable rainfall, which leads to crop failures and food shortages, which is politically//socially destabilizing in the affected regions.
Another example is that warming is moving the mosquito line further towards the poles (and other bugs too, such as the ash borer) which spread disease or kill trees//crops.
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These questions are impossible to answer objectively because there is no way to quantify the harm done by the effects of man-made global warming, just as there is no way to quantify the good that results from a warming climate. There are way too many variables at play.
Rainfall has always been unpredictable, and crop failure has always been a threat. Data shows that even if climate change has negatively impacted food production, we have more than offset those losses. Global food production per person has trended upwards since at least 1961.
https://ourworldindata.org/food-per-person/
I despise mosquitos as much as anyone, but there are more effective ways to control their numbers and their impact on health than the futile effort to turn down the temperature of the entire world. Malaria is an extremely survivable disease given adequate healthcare. It's orders of magnitude easier to provide adequate healthcare to people than to freeze those suckers out through climate change. Controlling their numbers through chemical or biological means is also much cheaper. Heck,
CRISPR might even
eliminate the ability for mosquitoes to transmit malaria.Mosquitos are a red herring to the discussion of the impact of global climate change on human quality of life.
The threat of nuclear war poses a much more likely threat to humanity than global warming, for instance. It's not that climate change is not worth thinking about, it just isn't worth getting angry or losing sleep over... and buying a Prius certainly isn't something a person should feel smug about.
Fortunately conservation and efficiency have their own intrinsic rewards, so the natural progression of things is to improve efficiency and conservation of resources. This progression of technology and efficiency will "automatically" reduce future greenhouse emissions way more than any silly Kyoto Protocol.
Fighting human nature is a losing proposition. Even if 99% of people agree that humans have a significant impact on global warming, their behavior will change very little.