Guardian Readers berate Black Lives Matter.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/06/climate-change-racist-crisis-london-city-airport-black-lives-matter#comment-82696101

I'm not left wing, but I do enjoy Guardian readers' brilliant comments in the comment section. Almost always, the comments are worth reading more than the actual content.

It's a shame that the person who wrote that comment couldn't be bothered to click on the source that the article author so kindly provided which showed that this statistic is based on cumulative emissions, not annual emissions. It really doesn't take a lot of effort to click on a hyperlink.

Yes, BLM are just misrepresenting the facts again, if you want to adjust something to show something it can easily be done.

Today we are no where near the top and unless you invent a time machine we can't change the past.

I can't see how you can call it a misrepresentation of the facts. This statistic may not be of huge relevance to plans about future emissions strategies but it's important to understand that the warming effect of CO2 is cumulative - the gas sticks around for a long time which means it's cumulative emissions which really cause the warming rather than annual emissions. This is why it's not really fair for the UK to act as if it's completely innocent in the matter of climate change because it really isn't. You can't just conveniently forget something just because it happened in the past, this country's historical emissions are to a significant extent responsible to the problems we are facing today.

Countries have polluted for free for decades, ignoring the very real social and economic costs of their actions. It's very convenient to just wave these damages away but that is the true misrepresentation of the facts in my view.

They are not saying that it is over the course of history most people who hears what they are saying are going to assume that they are talking about today.

The past on this is unimportant anyway you can't change it if you keep complaining about things that have happened that long ago you can't focus on the problems now which include the racial divide blmuk is trying to cause.

If you want somebody to blame you can look back over 100 years ago or if you want to fix the problems you can look at what is causing them today and today the problem isn't the uk.

There's really not a lot of point in me repeating this because the message doesn't seem to be getting through but I will try again. It is absolutely justified to say that the UK has a lot of responsibility for causing climate change because if you look at the extent to which we have actually contributed to the problem, it is significant. You can say "the past on this is unimportant" as much as you want, it doesn't change the fact that the past is relevant and important. You wouldn't excuse a criminal just because they were a serial killer several decades ago and now only commit petty theft.

If we were discussing climate change policy going into the future then of course we would want to look at the countries which are causing the major problems now* but if we're looking at who carries the responsibility for the issue as it manifests itself today and who has to be held responsible for it, then you need to look at cumulative emissions. What you are trying to do is blame-shifting.

*It's also important to understand that figures for annual CO2 emissions always underestimate the emissions that developed countries are responsible for and overestimate the emissions that developing countries are responsible for because an awful lot of the emissions from countries like China and India are from industries that have been essentially outsourced. They would not exist without demand from the developed west.

So you are complaining about the industrial revolution, something that has saved the life of hundreds of millions of people. Unbelievable, and hypocritical, why don't you stop using the internet and computer, both which wold not have existed without the revolution and begin an Amish life, hypocrite.

I am not complaining about the industrial revolution, global emissions were not high enough to be significant until the 20th Century. And congratulations for using the old and very boring strawman "But you're using a computer", I never argued that industrialisation itself was a bad thing. I am arguing that ignoring externalities, not taking a problem seriously when you're aware that it's a problem and refusing to accept any responsibility for problems you cause whilst achieving something that may well be noble is bad.

Right there, you are suggesting that Britain should do something as a result of developing the world, as I said, unbelievable.

How about you put your desperation to be outraged aside for a moment and think? If you've got a pharmaceutical company that undoubtedly does the world a service by producing life-saving drugs, would that justify it to dump toxic chemicals in a nearby river, destroying the local environment and harming local people dependent on primary production? Of course not, the argument that you're making is absurd. Technology undoubtedly brings the world a huge number of benefits and absolutely nobody is suggesting that we should go back to the middle ages. What people are saying is that there is now incontrovertible evidence that environmentally irresponsible production and development is having a ruinous impact on the world and that countries and organisations should take responsibility for the damage they have caused. Once again, I will repeat this for you because you seem to have difficulty understanding - I am not saying that the development itself is bad, I am saying that development without preventing external damage as a consequence of cost-cutting is bad. Following your logic, somebody who saves another person's life is perfectly justified to go around looting shops, which is obviously ridiculous.