• Question: How much time do we have left to stop climate change?

    Asked by anon-305184 on 24 Nov 2021.
    • Photo: Alexander De Bruin

      Alexander De Bruin answered on 24 Nov 2021:

      it’s already too late, the climate is changing. What we can do is start to slow or counter the rate of change through societal, technological, and political reform

    • Photo: Natasha Marchant

      Natasha Marchant answered on 25 Nov 2021:

      As Alex has said, climate change is already happening! The best we can hope for is to slow it down or even try to reverse it (if that’s even possible!) and we need to do it as quickly as possible as we don’t know where the point of no return will be

    • Photo: Andrew McDowall

      Andrew McDowall answered on 25 Nov 2021:

      We can never completely stop climate change. There are sources of it, from vulcanism and tectonic drift to orbital and rotation axis wobbles (and many more) that are well beyond our control and which changed the climate well before we appeared and will continue to do so long after we’re gone.
      The difference with the current climate changes is the source – us, and the speed which which the change is occuring and that we’re aware of it and our role in it (other evolutionary developments in the past have also changed the climate and caused mass extinctions, but it’s hard to get usefully mad with algae or blame them for not doing something about the harm they were causing belching out all that oxygen).
      As the cause of the current changes we can do something about it, to reduce the change and speed of change to something closer to the natural background climate change. In this there is no grace period, no holiday. The sooner we act, the greater the effect of these actions will be, or the lesser will be the actions we will need to take to achieve the same outcome. The longer we delay, the more dramatic the actions will need to be and the harder will be the choices that need to be made.

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