Russia just christened the world’s biggest ice-breaking ship. Listening to news stories about it, it occurred to me that Vladmir Putin might see global warming as more of a good thing than bad, as the warming of the Arctic seas has some positive consequences for Russian shipping. He might well be in favor of climate change, and he might not be the only Russian to feel that way,
Or maybe not. I don’t know.
Anyway, wondering about this brings a question to mind. Dopers living in countries other than the United States (regardless of your citizenship): what would you say is the consensus where you live about the reality and danger of climage change? Is it something people worry about at all?
Everyone in Australia believes it’s real, except the federal government apparently. They claim to believe it’s real, but make decisions that make it worse overall.
Australia will probably suffer more and longer droughts. We have little enough water as it is. This especially worries farmers from the interior. Aside from that, apart from heartfelt but confused environmental concern met with helpless worrying shrugs by the general populace, the Government still has its fingers in its ears going “La la la la”.
Consensus here is that it’s real and a danger. Of course, like everywhere else it just takes a coldish winter to make some people go “oh, nothing to worry about”, while others cry climate change with every undesirable weather. And like with climate research some people will confuse climate (the overall consensus) with weather (the day to day mood as interpreted by the media).
I had a coworker who once made the mistake of saying the moon landings were staged. He got swarmed by people informing him that “that’s a Heinlein movie, you idiot!”
A coworker’s wife is anti-vax. He received our condolences.
That our actions impinge directly on the environment (= our surroundings, after all), and that this can be Bad, is not something I’ve heard anybody doubt. People may not be very clear on the details, but even if GW didn’t exist and wasn’t at least partially man-made, everybody can understand “AC heats up the outside more than in cools the inside” and “close the fucking windows if you’re switching the AC on!” I have witnessed people asking someone who was in an AC’d store with the doors wide open if they were trying to cool the town, and pointing out that the blast of hot air coming out from directly above those doors was stronger and more expensive than if they were closed. Sometimes on a particularly cold day someone will say tongue-in-cheek “gee, it doesn’t much feel like warming today” and beg forgiveness when everybody glares at him, trying (and sometimes failing) to stave off the explanations.
My Costa Rican clients were all very environmentally conscious, not so good at the AC part of it. France, Italy, Sweden, Germany, Switzerland… the only person I’ve heard saying seriously that he thought climate change was “scaremongering” was a Swede whose brain has been pickled for decades.
In Australia the climate-change industry ran for several years on the idea that Australia was going to be hit by drought, to which we are uniquely politically sensitive.
With the “drought” line running, “climate change” achieved a high level of consensus, and support from both sides of politics. But action was blocked by political fighting: the centre-left choose conflict rather than consensus, and pushed the centre-right into a climate-denial position. The centre-left ran the “drought” line, and supported the climate-change industry: the climate-change industry ran the “drought” line, and supported the centre-left: the question became politicised.
When the “drought” fear campaign collapsed, the climate-change consensus and the climate-changed conflict collapsed with it. Everybody took a couple of steps back. The climate-change believers stopped making obviously false and unscientific claims: the climate-change deniers ran out of obviously false things to disagree with. Most people are a bit cynical and a bit embarrassed.
With the subsequent lack of attention, Australia is again moving towards a climate-change consensus, with moderate support from both sides of the centre, but now with deap opposition from both ends.
Same here in Belgium. You get trolls commenting that they “had to turn on the heat in May (!) because it was cold so Global Warming is BS” but on the whole, most people agree that it’s a real and serious issue.
Most South Africans probably haven’t even paid it any thought, assuming they’ve even heard of the idea…
Of the rest, I think a majority view it as real and a problem, but there are denialists here as there are everywhere. I don’t know any, but my wife, the environmental scientist, encounters them often enough.
The government itself is taking it reasonably seriously, but not enough to wean us off that sweet, sweet coal tit (partly because we have serious power supply issues as it is, and coal is cheap here), but enough that renewable are getting some support and they’re developing reasonable mitigation and adaptation strategies.
Being an already-drought-prone country, it’s taken as a very real threat in agricultural circles.
My impression was that it’s substantially accepted as real, manmade, and dangerous over here in Germany—googling up a poll (albeit from 2011) verified this impression: two percent reject the reality of climate change outright, with another five percent being somewhat skeptical; the same percentages doubted its anthropogenic nature. One percent claimed it won’t have much impact, with another four percent on the skeptical side there.
French here. There’s no debate whatsoever on the reality of climate change, and little to no debate on whether it’s anthropogenic. The only question remaining is “what do we do about it ?”, with the conservatives essentially going “well China/the US/Africa isn’t helping so why should we ?! We’re just going to hamstring our own economy and it won’t even do a thing for the climate !”. Which is dumb for a lot of reasons, first of which is game theory. But I digress.
As for me, I think the best argument to put forward to deniers is : soon, as in the next 5 to 10 years or so, a clear year-long maritime route will exist north of Canada. And it’s sure enough that maritime insurers and freight movers are making plans about it, and it’s going to substantially change the global economic dynamic.
When ponderous, terminally risk-averse institutions like global investment banks catch up to an idea, you **know **it’s a fact.
No consensus in New Zealand but anthropomorphic global warming is readily accepted as reality by younger people. The politicians accept AGW is happening but don’t/can’t do much about it. Older people think it is a scam and a way for new taxes to be dreamed up.
There is no intelligent discussion at a national level of the difference between human impacts and natural climate change. We can’t change the big picture - cycles of the sun - but we can stop poisoning the air soil and ocean. If GW was explained as pollution, everybody would get it.
However the arguments are about climate change and skeptics say this happens naturally so we adjust and live with it. Which has a certain truth.
In Canada there would seem to be a reasonable understanding of anthropogenic climate change (except among Albertans and Conservative politicians) but not a lot of agreement about what to do about it. The most obvious thing would be to shut down the oil sands which produce oil, but only burning a lot of what they produce to extract it. In Quebec it is an easy sell because we get virtually all our electric power hydroelectricity. And sell a lot to NY during the AC season (and something like 70% of the home heating is electric so that is a good fit).