• 18,000 Gather in Paris as 700 Scientists Call for Action Against Climate Change
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Protests in Paris as climate talks stumble More than 18,000 people marched Saturday in Paris as part of an international mobilisation to show popular support for urgent measures to combat climate change ahead of a San Francisco summit. Crowds overflowed a square in front of City Hall before marching east to the Place de la République, carrying an urgent message that it's up to the public to put global warming at the top of the political agenda. Some 30,000 of the protesters had responded to an appeal on Facebook, launched by a man called Maxime Lelong who described himself as an "ordinary concerned citizen", saying they would attend the protests. Lelong’s appeal came in the wake of the resignation of France’s popular environment minister and celebrity green campaigner, Nicolas Hulot, who quit his role last month, accusing the French government of only taking baby steps in the fight against climate change. NGOs and organisers of Saturday’s events in Paris stressed that the protest was not about supporting one politician or another, Moore added, it was really about honouring the words that Hulot gave when he resigned. "In an era of [Donald] Trump," Hulot said, "many people are simply resigned to their fate on climate change. That’s the absolute opposite of what we need." The front-page of France's daily Liberation newspaper featured a call from 700 French scientists for the government to "move from incantations to acts to move toward a carbon-free society." The signing scientists also called for "strong and clear political choices" and said "solutions are available". The march in Paris, organised with the theme "Change the system, but don't change the climate," was both festive and serious. One protester, Manuel Bibes, denounced the plastic that inundates daily life. Another, Rodgrigo de la Vega criticised the practice of driving down the road to buy bread. "There is no Planet B," a sign read.
"There is no Planet B" good one. we should probably make one, though.
I'm so glad these movements have numbers, we need them now more than ever
While no other planet is as sacred as our home planet, there are more planets than alphabets for our use.
I think it's a few orders of magnitude easier to fix our own rather than to even try seriously colonizing another one
There's only one other planet (Mars) that's seriously within our reach of colonization in the near future. It won't be comparable to Earth for a long time, if ever even if we do colonize it. There's probably billions or even trillions of planets out there that we could colonize but it's not possible to reach them with our current technology.
Seems rather isolated to France so far, probably due to Hulot's resignation being a bombastic wake-up call. It definitely needs to gain traction abroad.
We already have a lot of activist groups all over the world, here's hoping this sends waves across the world.
yeah but you know profits.
It's not just an issue of corporations wanting to maximize their profits. They're enabled by a majority of consumers who don't care enough to actually change their lifestyle and all that it implies regarding the environment. This is why this movement claims that initiatives against climate change should be spearheaded by the public.
what if climate change is all a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing? /s
Even if climate change causes mass extinction and then a nuclear war goes off, working to make Earth habitable is still a better investment than trying to do the same for any other planet.
Of course and hopefully we will
Unfortunately for that humanity is not a hivemind and trying to start a global movement from the bottom up is simply impossible.
In the long run it may be possible to either create an artificial magnetic field, or restart Mars' core. We aren't really sure how the reduced gravity will impact human health in the long term. Even if theoretically possible, it's quite difficult and will take a very long time to make Mars into a habitable planet.
Governments are elected from the "bottom up" in Western countries. Lots of popular movements throughout history have originated from the general public. I'm not sure why that suddenly wouldn't be possible when it comes to climate change?
Venus actually has arguably better prospects, but in either case I don't think it's a terribly realistic solution to the problem.
Venus and the jovian system exist. To be frank they're also better colony targets than mars.
Venus comes with it's own set of challenges that probably push it further out than Mars colonization. No matter how many moons or planets in our solar system we could colonize it would be better to fix Earth.
Mark my words we will never leave this solar system. Really Mars is the only planet we have even a remote chance of colonizing and even that doesn't seem very hopeful. If we can't unfuck this planet how on earth could we make Mars habitable.
The sort of timescale you'd need to get a self-sustaining colony on literally anywhere else in the solar system already far exceeds how soon global warming is going to start showing its worst. It's come to the point where we need to survive one Earth or we won't survive at all.
Fighting climate change is something that everyone needs to be involved in, especially as one of the easiest ways of fighting it is by reducing consumption wherever possible. People need to start taking personal responsibility for how they are contributing, and stop trying to push all of the burden onto other people or governments.
we're not even sure if it is even possible to traverse the vast distances required to reach another solar system with anything even remotely human.
I find it odd that reducing livestock agriculture and meat and dairy consumption isn't part of the agenda. Sure, we can change all our energy production to renewables, and our cars to electric, but this will still be a massive problem for climate change. I guess it's easier to get people on board when it's less of a sacrifice to their day to day life, which makes sense.
food production is such a tough thing to quantify
Are you saying the impact on climate change cannot be measured well?
You're absolutely right. I feel bad about the hostile reception I got for my initial post in this thread. Keeping our planet alive well into the future is something that sci-fi fantasy and spacetravel won't fix and it is not even relevant here. And not for a looong time.
agriculture is an especially difficult part of emissions to quantify because you don't have fixed processes and the chemistry isn't often completely understood. Methane gas reactors for example are a mixed bag, you're fermenting and capturing what normally escapes but you're also purposefully creating methane where other waste digestion methods create co2 or co instead. its trickier to quantify agriculture then it is say oil production where you know the chemistry and know the masses of components.
We actually have the technology to build above the cloudtops of Venus where its not that bad. The only problem is that there isn't a real reason to be there other than for science. But, at this point, you can say the same about Mars.
Agriculture is an important sector we need to tackle, but it's also one of the smaller ones. https://nepis.epa.gov/Exe/ZyPDF.cgi?Dockey=P100USI5.pdf
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