why climate change matters

"I have been to many talks at UCT about this topic and every time the same thing happens, they leave out any natural impacts from the sea, clouds, decaying forests, volcanoes, insects, animals and only tend to blame humans. Their conclusions are always the same, end fossil fuel and the world will be a better place, yet they do not give any alternatives. They go on about how the polar ice caps are melting and have never been this defrosted ever, yet if you watch what is happening in Siberia and the Yamal peninsula gas pockets are being formed from decaying animals which were caught in these ice shelves. Now if the ice levels have never been this low in history, then how did animals get trapped in them? I do research in alternative fuels and even with all the billions of funding, the highest percentage it could enter is around 10-15%...so a country still needs something else to take up the slack and every country ends up taking fossil fuel. In fact the trend for coal use globally is on the increase and there is no evidence in sight to show any decrease soon. Even if we were to stop fossil fuel use, the CO2 being produced by nature will still so called negatively impact the world, just at slower rate...but destroy the world in eventuality...or so they say. These climatologists cannot even predict an earthquake, yet they can for sure predict the end of the world, without real tangible evidence. Mars is more evidence of this, Mars according to geologists once had a favourable environment for humans, yet without 1 human or without fossil fuel it destroyed itself! Look at Saturn, astronomers are noticing that its rings are disappearing....without humans and without fossil fuel...all by natural progression. Imagine if this climate change could do a 180 and then we all sit together to find real solutions, maybe there are ways of making fossil fuel cleaner or safer? Imagine putting the billions that go to alternative energy and do not produce significant progress to projects within the fossil fuel industry which were sidelined due to funding problems. While we all flow towards alternative energy...all we have got is higher energy prices, higher vehicle prices, higher transport costs. Have you noticed while civilian fuel prices go up and up, jet fuel has been going down down down and yet the cost of flying is still going up and up. Let us look at Al Gore, his carbon foot print is so huge, you would not expect him to be the climate change activist of climate change activists....then you also have China who cares less. If everyone does not have the buy in then you will fail. I read yesterday that the Chinese built a waste to energy plant in Ethiopia....a little more investigation found that the plant started being built in Sept 2014 and using an obsolete emission standard which expired in July 2014 I think. Yet there was an updated version from 2010...which begs the question why did they not use the more stringent emission standard and went for an obsolete version instead? It is a rhetorical question, had they built the factory according to the new standard it probably would have been illegal to build it. In conclusion, I do not say that I do not believe that the climate is changing, however I do believe that this issue is not as serious as politicians make it out to be, because the world has been in this situation before and managed to have spectacular ice ages and survived thousands of years after them...There was an expedition to the Arctic to study the levels of ice there, the scientists employed the strongest icebreaker in the world, they predicted the voyage would get to their destination in record time because the ice was very thin....in the end, the ice was so thick, the research had to be abandoned...How about that egg in the face and this research had got funding on the grandest scale. There are too many holes in the climate change topic and even the professors who come talk admit it....I feel socialism and communism would make matters so much worse."

it's absolutely correct to say that the climate changes and has changed without us. that doesn't mean that industrialized humans haven't enormously influenced the rate of change, and we have more evidence than we need to demonstrate that. it's easy to pinpoint fossil fuel as a large contributor, but there are problems with that which you've pointed out; however, looking at the prices of things doesn't mean much because a lot more than fuel costs need to be factored in.
getting off fossil fuel is nice in theory, but solar, wind and biofuel are not really viable alternatives as you've pointed out. hydro, geothermal and nuclear, on the other hand, are more than capable of doing the job, and the tiny risks associated with nuclear are absolutely worth the efficiency of energy output we'd get.

it's also not true that getting off fossil fuel alone will be sufficient, as we have as much if not more influence coming from animal agriculture, and all of that combined with a whole lot of other things which include an horrific quantity of food waste being stored in garbage dumps, ocean acidification and depletion, and a reliance on unrecyclable rare metals for our tech parts.

it's also true that we've had worse climates in history, but there's a fundamental difference causing the concern for the current trend: we weren't around when those animals were trapped way back when, and as adaptable as we are humans beings are not capable of adapting to the coming changes "en masse". a heck of a lot of us will die. mostly in wars over resources like water - which if you recall is what began all the trouble in syria.

the planet will survive whatever comes, and it'll most likely re-equalize at some point in the future. human beings? unless we slow this down dramatically or get off the planet, we're toast. we might survive in pockets of mad-max-like hunter-gatherer tribalism, but all the wonderful things that make us so amazing? we'll lose them, and as far as we know we're the most advanced species this universe has produced.

even if all this was some political conspiracy - which is so outside of the realm of the possibility that it's almost funny - not aiming for sustainability is simply not intelligent behaviour. a big part of evolution is optimization, and since industrial consumerism took hold a century ago we've been devolving into a species of wastefulness, ignorance and isolation.

i don't know what socialism and communism have to do with anything, i'm an anarcho-capitalist and i'm pretty confident that my political ideology has little to do with how i'll fare during civil war and surviving in the wilderness. i'm also fairly sure that all the wonderful tech and knowledge we've been developing ever since we started farming is worth saving. i also don't think there're enough politicians anywhere who have enough of a handle on the situation to turn us around without a fight.

this whole "debate" misses one important thing. we live on a tiny planet, it's the only one we can survive on (until we manage to escape), and there's a fundamental principle that most of us learn early on goes something along the lines of "don't poop on your own step"... or more accurately, "in your own drinking water". we are long overdue in applying this principle to how we treat our environment, none of us are immune from the shit-storm that's coming.