If you think human waste and pollution doesn’t contribute to climate change…

I grew up on the east coast and it’s unfortunate and circumstantial that I’m currently here, until summer anyway.

I was born in 1984, not too long ago 😆 but I live in an area that used to be a natural wonder yet still surrounded by many major cities. A beautiful clean beach and quirky, friendly little towns. In my short life I’ve seen incredible changes due to pollution, overpopulation and gentrification. Nobody cared about the native land, the wildlife. They built houses on sand, on the edge of the ocean that I’ve watched overcome by high tides and hurricanes. You can smell the waste from power plants, you can smell peoples shit because there’s nowhere for it to go. The salt water and coastline are often experiencing oil spills. I’ve seen the water rise and the beaches dredged to hold off nature and protect revenue. This area’s air quality dropped about 30% in my lifetime. We have extremely high cancer rates and no longer experience the seasons. In fall everything just dies, no pretty colors anymore. Everything is gray and bare until spring when it becomes so unbearably hot and humid and crowded you can’t enjoy the outdoors. You can’t even swim in the freshwater here anymore without catching something.

I drove up towards Philly this weekend and it’s just smog. Stinky, thick, choking smog. People living and jammed into apartments all the way around it.

Yes climate change is perfectly natural and I consider us humans along for the ride, BUT we are speeding up the destruction of sustainability for our species. We’re polluting ourselves and everything around us. We ARE changing our climate. We live in a big bubble and then each of us acts like we’re in our own personal bubble. Like nothing can touch us. Like if we say it isn’t happening then it isn’t. We make garbage like it vanishes after the dump truck drives off. We consume like resources are unlimited. We destroy like we know the future is secure.

We could do a lot better. I’ve been all over the western US and they seem to care more, and also have more space. But east coast is trashed. Not only are our byproducts toxic, but the attitude here is shit. You can’t be nice. You just can’t. You can, but then you’d better run because someone is going to think you’re prey.

Weird times in general. In my short life I’ve seen soooooo much destruction. And I fear for my son, what will be left for him? None of the rich politicians cares about you, your family, your future, they care about having money and having it now. So I don’t understand why people believe what they hear on TV. I’d say a majority of humans are fooled, seemingly unevolving when it comes to lasting as a species. We argue about almost everything and nothing improves. But we let our “leaders” decide the outcome? Geez… 😆

robb65 · 56-60, M

I believe it's a given that the climate is changing and I believe it's a given that pollution is in some way affecting the climate. There's even speculation that pollution from the industrial revolution played a role in bringing about the end of the last mini ice age.
The problem I've got is that there's a big jump from "pollution is causing climate change" and "the world is quickly coming to an end if we don't do "X" right now. Many of the solutions proposed would result in people having no way to keep warm, travel to work, or grow crops. They really don't care how many humans die as the result of their "solution" as long as we save the planet and save it now.
Maybe you're not old enough to remember this, but not that many years ago it wasn't "climate change", it was "global warming" . Eventually the people pushing global warming realized there was a problem with "global warming" and changed to talking about "climate change" instead.
Before "global warming" there was a hole in the ozone that there was no way to repair and was only gonna get worse unless we banned all CFC's. So we started banning them. Oddly enough, the ban on certain refrigerants happened to coincide with patents expiring and the owners of those patents developing new substitutes they could patent. No one mentions that hole in the ozone now, guess they were wrong about it not getting better.
As far as pollution goes, for several decades now we've made efforts, and continue to make efforts to clean up the environment. No doubt more needs to be done, (and maybe some of those efforts were misguided) but we're working on it. I can remember as a kid if you got behind a semi out on the highway you could tell when he was under load, and when he had to gear down by watching the smoke from his stacks. I can't remember the last time I saw a big truck smoking. As a kid I could smell the paper mill(S?) 40 or 50 miles south of us if the wind was blowing the right way, that got cleaned up. I can remember when schools still heated with coal and you could see the smoke from the smoke stack on cold mornings, it's been decades since I saw that. Sawmills once burnt their sawdust in what amounted to open silos (not even sure how to describe it), it's hard to find an example of those now and they haven't been used in decades.