CampeadorPerhaps I should be specific.
All scientific theory can be questioned and tested, the validity of climate change can and should always be challenged. I'm not saying it does or does not exist, I'm mainly just playing devil's advocate to stir up the choir. I'm always amused at how vociferously folks argue that climate change exists, simply because people like Bill Nye tell them it is so.
If the goal is to rapidly move all power grids to renewable energy, then I think the solution to the problem is worse than the problem itself. As I stated, wind and solar are not practical solutions, and they wreak havoc on electrical grids.
The world needs fossil fuels to generate power, there's no way around it. Even if the US ended all carbon emissions tomorrow, it wouldn't make any difference. The only realistic solution is a cost-effective method of capturing carbon emissions. Let's stop pretending Tesla batteries are going to save the world. And, while we're at it, let's stop pretending that the production of all those batteries doesn't come with significant environmental damage.
Nuclear is also another solution to reducing carbon emissions, but it comes with it's own risks and environmental damage.
This is more or less all fine, but the first thing that needs to happen is that people need to stop living in denial that this isn't really a problem. The narrative to the contrary is fabricated. It's identical to the narrative that smoking doesn't cause cancer thirty or forty years ago. Bill Nye is a total jackass (he suggested the Syrian refugee crisis was the result of climate change, for example), but the scientific consensus is what it is. Climate change exists, human activity is a major cause of it, and it's a big problem for us as a species going forward.
That doesn't mean aspects of it, measurement methodologies and individual conclusions about the way the warming trend is happening and its likely effects, shouldn't be challenged.
Better climate science is always possible and is something we should strive for, and there are no sacred truths in science. But
denying the reality outright at this stage is basically Flat-Earther nonsense.
I have no issue with you saying "this solution to the problem doesn't work because X, and that one also doesn't work because Y, and at this point we obviously need fossil fuels for society to function, and any transition to renewable sources is going to probably take a hundred years or so". That sort of line is totally reasonable and the left is obnoxious when it gets all absolutist and acts like all oil production must stop as of yesterday. But don't try to obfuscate the
base issue. Intellectual honesty goes a hell of a long way with just about anyone who isn't an ideologue, and you weren't going to convince the ideologues of anything anyway.
