pknoerr wrote:
Every day we as individuals have the ability to totally cease our combustion of fossil fuels. Turn off the AC, the furnace, stop driving the car, grow your own food ... If we know that rising temps and CO2 levels will cause challenges for a couple decades now, why have we as individuals been waiting for society as a whole to solve the problem before we begin to make those changes ourselves?
PK, I really don't understand this kind of thinking. Individuals are constrained by all kinds of concerns and conditions that are best handled by groups (and collective decision making). Insurance and exposure to risk best falls into this category. If you want to protect yourself against risk, do you individually throw the dice, and pay the hospital for your cancer treatment if you should come up short (more likely go into bankruptcy). Or do you pay a little bit into an insurance program, keep your livelihood, and spread out the costs among the largest group of people.
How do individual choices put a scrubber on a smoke stack, or how do consumers make complicated decisions about chemical exposure and health risks (when most people don't have advanced degrees in chemical engineering or are enrolled in medical programs). Consumers don't want to be burdened with such choices on a daily (second by second) basis. Most people just want to go to work, spend time with their family, laugh a little, and enjoy a vacation or two. The challenge of looking over a wastewater treatment plan before you buy a hacksaw at Canadian Tire is a bit daunting for most folks (and best left to the experts in my view).
In a modern society, division of labor is a remarkably good thing. We can't all be captains of our own ship, or self-made masters of our own fate (no matter how much we try). We are doomed to depend on others to make our individual dreams come true (regardless of our fantasies of autonomy and independence and being self made). We do need others in some respect … I take it you know this (even if only on a smaller scale of your immediate relationships, your community and your family).
And what is this bunk about models? Yes, the earth's climate is a complex system (involving feedback loops, uncertain ocean and air circulation patterns, unpredictable wildfire and seasonal shifts, volcanic episodes, etc.). In this sense, the climate is unpredictable and models are an approximation. What does this have to do with anything, and the basic premise that unprecedented rise of carbon in the atmosphere is human generated, and leading to very rapid shifts (far shorter than a geological scale) in the environment that are destabilizing and costly for human communities and long term sustainability. I never took you to be such a philistine about these things. Do we really have to argue over these things all over again, I thought this was pretty much well established and a given at this point? The main question is how best to address it and deal with it, spread out the risk, and best realize our collective interests and goals in the process? The camping metaphor pertains here. All we can do is mitigate the impacts of our own actions, we seem to be far past the point of avoiding them (as any wilderness traveller might clearly and honestly tell you). Learning to be good travel partners (neighbors), and enjoy the scenery, is going to be key.