TheBeastie said:
You can do whatever you like, it doesn't bother me. Increasing co2 helps plants grow. Unless the media is manipulating us everyone should know that as basic common knowledge.
That's great if you're a plant. Most of us on the forum here aren't.
Most of us will have to live through increased allergens, increased ferocity storms and longer droughts. In agricultural exporting countries, we don't need to worry so much about lower yields from crops: Just higher prices, but food security could be an issue in many places - in fact it's already happening:
Throughout the spring and summer in 2016, tensions flared after ethnic Uzbek villagers and police blocked access to the reservoir and its water, which lies inside Kyrgyzstan. Uzbekistan drove armored personnel carriers into Kyrgyzstan, and both sides have captured and detained each other’s citizens. Fistfights and potshots have been common. For farmers scratching out a bare existence from increasingly dry land, water is lifeblood, and worth fighting for.
I have come to this remote and haphazard army post, standing between Uzbek and Kyrgyz farmers whose lands both need water, to see for myself the front line of climate change. A 2014 study in the Journal of Climate, published by the American Meteorological Society, reported that the warming rate in Central Asia has been twice the average global warming rate over the same period, and larger than any previous decade, over the first 12 years of the 21st century. As the region heats up, it faces increasing political instability and violence
http://nautil.us/issue/45/power/when-climate-change-starts-wars
It's easy for us in the first world. You can't smell or see Co2, and at these concentrations, it doesn't affect our breathing, our food and water is secure, and our houses withstand storms well. If anthropogenic climate change is real, then it's a minor inconvenience to us. For much of the rest of the world though, it'll be a disaster. But hey, we can sit in our ivory towers, and insist it's either not real, or not a big deal, or it's really uncertain. We can afford that.
Maybe anthropogenic climate change isn't real. I wouldn't say that the evidence is beyond reasonable doubt, but I would say on the balance of probability, it is true. But that doesn't mean we should be complacent. The cost of being complacent is too high, and the changes to make are relatively cheap. My car was $7000 more expensive than the fully petrol model and it will have paid itself off before the end of its life. It produces 1/3rd of the CO2 of the petrol model per kilometre. It'll be zero once I get a big enough solar farm on the roof. But even if that wasn't compelling enough, would you rather ride behind me when my car is on electric, or when it's burning fuel? Even without CO2, cars emit PM2.5 and PM10, along with all sorts of VOCs (depending on the quality and temp of the catalytic converter).
Unfortunately, this is not a "You can do whatever you like" type issue, because we all share the same planet. I'm no greenie, hell, I once told a Greenpeace recruiter that I don't join terrorist organisations (Greenpeace is on a register of "Organisations known to use violence to achieve political goals" - the same register ISIS is on). But I just think from a risk management perspective, it's better to spend a little more, enjoy a little less, than to find out too late that we're in trouble. The best analogy I've heard is that we're in a car driving in fog. One passenger says "Hey, I think there's a lot of pedestrian crossings on this road. We should slow down in case the fog means we see it late". The other passenger says "There's no evidence that there are pedestrian crossings on this road. If we slow down, we'll be late, let's just keep going". Any prudent person would slow down, because the cost of being wrong one way is potentially someone else dead. The cost of being wrong the other way is an unnecessary minor inconvenience to ourselves.
Think about whether you really want to be that driver, that says "My convenience is more important than a good chance of killing someone else."
