Do older people need to have global warming explained to them?

All governments today are obsessed with growth. We must have growth. If we don’t have growth apparently it’s a bad thing. Growth means that the public have to buy things. They have to buy more and more things. Buying more and more things leads to the use of more raw materials and more manufactured materials. Massive consumption is what governments want, but it leads to further global warming and pollution. We do need to learn to live without the conspicuous waste that we see around us every day. Recycling is good, reusing is good, fewer miles travelled is good, but until all governments really grasp the mettle, little will change globally.

M0nica

volver My DGC are 12 and 15. Their parents are both in their 50s. The average age for a first child in the UK is now 31, and the number of women giving birth at well over 30 has been rising for several decades. My DDiL was not exceptional when, 15 years ago, she had her first child in her late 30s. - and where does it say that the children featured are the eldest in their family?

Lookat the figures in this link www.comparethemarket.com/life-insurance/content/changing-age-of-uk-parents/ It shows that between 2000 and 2018 the number of babies born to women over 35 has risen from 100,000 to 153,000

You ask also why people are misinterpreting this article, what is your interpretation and why are you so sure that you have the right interpretation?

My interpretation is in my OP.

Your interpretation: schoolchildren teach their elderly/50-ish parents how to suck eggs about something everybody has known about for decades.

My interpretation, which is what the article actually says: young people learn how to discuss lifestyle changes with their parents, who are of indeterminate age.

We're pushing 80, have daughters 60 to 40, GC / GGC/ GGGC pushing 40 to newborn. Ages people have children vary.

It seems the parents in the article are our GC/GGC age.

Elegran

No Volver I am not missing the point,you are. I have never suggested that everyone should go back to the thirties or live in the cinders eating rotting turnips before going to bed with newspaper over them, or that doing that would turn everyone into plaster saints.

I never even mentioned the thirties because I wasn't there! (Though if I repeated things I heard from those who WERE there it would make your hair stand on end) - I am not even demanding that we go back to the forties, fifties or sixties, which I do have experience of. A more frugal life was not a choice then, it was forced upon us, but now material goods are more readily available to more people, so there are more by-products to dispose of environmentally. The details now have changed, but the general attitude of making maximum use of what you do have and being aware of the effects of how you dispose of your waste is the same, from the carbon dioxide in your car exhaust, through the mountain of "disposable" nappies with plastic backing that you consign weekly to landfill to the 5-year-old kitchen that you replace because the black marble top is now out of fashion

What I am saying is that "society" ( an umbrella word for "people in general") needs a can-do attitude instead of a "someone should be providing xxxx for me but I don't need to look after it it" one. Why do they expect to have modern standards of living laid on but not expect to turn off the hot water tap when they have enough water? to have flush toilets that magically remove all the waste but a lot of people still haven't got the message that wet wipes do not disintegrate when flushed and will eventually clog a drain somewhere.

Ordinary people in the 40s didn't know that the population was going to expand as exponenially as it did, or that the world would welcome easy-life, plastic, disposable everything so enthusiastically that the debris will be around long after mankind has become another failed civilisation.

👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻

volver My DGC are 12 and 15. Their parents are both in their 50s. The average age for a first child in the UK is now 31, and the number of women giving birth at well over 30 has been rising for several decades. My DDiL was not exceptional when, 15 years ago, she had her first child in her late 30s. - and where does it say that the children featured are the eldest in their family?

Lookat the figures in this link www.comparethemarket.com/life-insurance/content/changing-age-of-uk-parents/ It shows that between 2000 and 2018 the number of babies born to women over 35 has risen from 100,000 to 153,000

You ask also why people are misinterpreting this article, what is your interpretation and why are you so sure that you have the right interpretation?

My interpretation is in my OP.

volver3

...and propagate the misinformation and perpetuate the myth.

✂️✂️✂️

...and propagate the misinformation and perpetuate the myth.

Because they were answering the original post with the title including the words "older people" ?

Not everyone answers the statements made in the article that is referred to in the post, for various reasons, some more valid than others. Instead, they answer what they can read on the thread and in the thread title. It is better to read the text at the horse's mouth, but it isn't a cardinal sin to skip that and rely on the original poster instead.

So they could be 35 and their children aren't schoolchildren teaching them to suck eggs.

Again, why are people so intent on misrepresenting this article?

The parents in the article or the photo could well be in their fifties. You can't tell from their looks - clothes, makeup and hairdyes render people ageless It isn't just 20 year-olds who have children, you know. To have children of 17, 20 and 21, they could be a mix of anything between 35 and 60.

Elegran

So we need to vote for Governments that do get their act together and stop voting by whether are going to raise or lower our taxes by a fraction of a penny. Then we have to pay attention to the limits they will place on all the things that are well-known to be contributing to global warming.

This, we agree on.

So we need to vote for Governments that do get their act together and stop voting by whether are going to raise or lower our taxes by a fraction of a penny. Then we have to pay attention to the limits they will place on all the things that are well-known to be contributing to global warming.

I knew this quote (Mark Twain, unsurprisingly) was skulking at the back of my mind so I looked it up and IMO is both applicable and relevant to this argument;

“ When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years .”

No Volver I am not missing the point,you are. I have never suggested that everyone should go back to the thirties or live in the cinders eating rotting turnips before going to bed with newspaper over them, or that doing that would turn everyone into plaster saints.

I never even mentioned the thirties because I wasn't there! (Though if I repeated things I heard from those who WERE there it would make your hair stand on end) - I am not even demanding that we go back to the forties, fifties or sixties, which I do have experience of. A more frugal life was not a choice then, it was forced upon us, but now material goods are more readily available to more people, so there are more by-products to dispose of environmentally. The details now have changed, but the general attitude of making maximum use of what you do have and being aware of the effects of how you dispose of your waste is the same, from the carbon dioxide in your car exhaust, through the mountain of "disposable" nappies with plastic backing that you consign weekly to landfill to the 5-year-old kitchen that you replace because the black marble top is now out of fashion

What I am saying is that "society" ( an umbrella word for "people in general") needs a can-do attitude instead of a "someone should be providing xxxx for me but I don't need to look after it it" one. Why do they expect to have modern standards of living laid on but not expect to turn off the hot water tap when they have enough water? to have flush toilets that magically remove all the waste but a lot of people still haven't got the message that wet wipes do not disintegrate when flushed and will eventually clog a drain somewhere.

Ordinary people in the 40s didn't know that the population was going to expand as exponenially as it did, or that the world would welcome easy-life, plastic, disposable everything so enthusiastically that the debris will be around long after mankind has become another failed civilisation.

Well quite honestly you could be as profligate as you like but unless the governments of the world get their act together on energy generation and biodiversity, its won't make the blindest bit of difference.

My yogurt pot recycling isn't going to change the world.

OK, Nowt to do with us then. We can just carry on destroying the planet, eh?

If anything, it's a warning

It's for the benefit our descendants

We each leave a legacy, shouldn't it be one where as little harm was caused as possible?

https://www.gransnet.com/uploads/talk/202304/medium-798201-screenshot-2023-04-23-194714.jpg https://www.gransnet.com/uploads/talk/202304/medium-178407-screenshot-2023-04-23-194655.jpg https://www.gransnet.com/uploads/talk/202304/medium-450315-screenshot-2023-04-23-194616.jpg

I may have exaggerated by the elderly, but it is about schoolchildren talking to people in their 50s, with the belief behind it that the older generation do vaguely know about climate change but have no idea what they can do about it.

No its not.

These are the parents in the article. One of their children is 17, one is 20 and one is 21.

Why are people so intent on misrepresenting the message behind this? Why is everybody talking it as a personal insult?

It isn't about schoolchildren explaining climate change in words of one syllable to the elderly.

I may have exagerated by the elderly, but it is about schoolchildren talking to people in their 50s, with the belief behind it that the older generation do vaguely know about climate change but have no idea what they can do about it.

Which frankly is absolutely ludicrous because climate change has been of real concern for 35 years theconversation.com/30-years-ago-global-warming-became-front-page-news-and-both-republicans-and-democrats-took-it-seriously-97658 and we have heard more and more about itas time progresses, it fills the media on a daily basis with hints and tips about how to make small changes to our lives to reduce our carbon foot prints, while on a wider scale, scientists and engineers first involved in developing windfarms, making anything using electricity more energy efficient are now reaching retirement age.

So news features like this that encourage young people to teach their parents how to suck eggs are agist and patronising because many parents and grandparents know far more about the subject than the child trying to instruct them.

Foxygloves

^As long as people make a virtue out of how they were all perfect environmentalists in the thirties then nothing will get better. That's completely irrelevant^

Not many even here able to remember the thirties. !.

Foxygloves Not many even here able to remember the thirties.

Or the 40s

But Elegran it’s missing the point. We can’t de-evolve society to be the way it was 80 years ago. While we might have been really good at being frugal, we were polluting the world with smoke from coal fires, maybe even filling the streets with horse poo. We had oceans full of effluent (well, we still have that today around England, but we shouldn’t have.) And we were making things extinct at an alarming rate. We thought it was OK to shoot the last example of any animal we liked because we were hungry.

To me, your view of how we all lived such blameless lives just lets people off the hook. We could all iron our wrapping paper to our hearts content, but unless you want to go back to frost on the inside of the windowpanes and baths once a week, we need change at a societal level. We need to find ways to provide the standards of living that everybody is entitled to expect, at a way that doesn’t use the resources of the planet unsustainably.

And we won’t get that by not eating in the street.

I’m afraid your original post at 14:43 smacks of the “young people today don't know how to cut back” attitude that doesn’t help get us anywhere. Climate change is a result of the industrial revolution, which happened long before the 40s; people alive in the 40s are culpable too.

As long as people make a virtue out of how they were all perfect environmentalists in the thirties then nothing will get better. That's completely irrelevant

Not many even here able to remember the thirties. !.

That’s exactly how I remember things Elegran. Our first house cost £1750. House prices took off very soon after that, no credit cards then but suddenly there seemed to be invitations to buy on credit, or with a bank loan, everywhere. It seemed to be the beginning of ‘buy now, pay later’, and whilst many of our generation saw the flaw in that some didn’t, and that ethos has been adopted by many younger people. I’m thankful that my son and daughter in law aren’t amongst them.

You could be right, GSM We could only get a mortgage for two and a half times one salary (and paying up that mortgage when we soon were indeed living on only one salary as our children arrived proved that the lenders were quite right in not countenancing lending any more than they did)

Within a few years house the advent of a safe and effective Pill persuaded the lenders that they could lend more multiples of two salaries - which was rapidly followed by a steep rise in house prices as couples realised that they could now afford to make a higher bid, and sellers realised that they could hold out for even more because there were more people out there who would bid against one another. The same applied in other areas. You could afford more for a bigger more powerful car if you took out a loan, and banks were keen to help you. The lenders made more out of the deal, from the rising interest rates. Credit cards made it possible to buy just about everything instantly- live now, pay later.

It is not irrelevant, Volver, and no-one was a perfect environmentalist, neither have I claimed that they were. There wasn't enough available to them for it to be wasted or spoilt, so they didn't waste anything, nor shit on their own doorsteps. It was a way that people lived when they didn't assume that there was a wealth of untapped resources lying out there just waiting for them to grab as much of it as possible and throw into landfill what they didn't use, or what was no longer the most attractive they could see and want.

We are now in a situation where we are using up the resources of our earth home faster than they can replenish themselves, cutting down hardwood forests faster than they can regrow, filling our oceans with our discarded rubbish, using up rare metals for frivolous leisure technology, and sending plants into extinction that could form the raw material for new medical treatments. We need a similar mindset to the make-do-and-mend one again to reverse that trend, we shouldn't banish it as out-of-date - unless you have a new mindset to take its place that can be guaranteed to take root more effectively in the brains of the whole global population and actually motivate the pampered and unthinking to change their approach?