(Image by Evren Ozdemir, from Pixabay.)
Intro
I’d heard of “global warming” as early as elementary school (probably in connection to polar bears), but it took several years, a group of vegetarian high schoolers, an environmental internship, and at least two cups of tea with a Scottish birdwatcher before I really cared about the topic. Before, most of my passion for nature had centered around animals—frogs, pandas, nudibranchs, and the like—and climate change, by contrast, had always struck me as a rather broad and amorphous issue.
In the past two years, though, I’ve realized that climate change is a grave issue with heavy implications for plants, animals, and humans for generations down the line, and that we don’t have much time to prevent some of its worst effects. In light of that, I wanted to use this post (hopefully the first of a series) to open up a focused conversation on climate change, addressing both its causes and implications.
As you probably already know, the increase of certain gases, such as carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide, have a proven link to the increase of global temperatures, trapping the infrared radiation reflected off the earth from the sun. Human activity, such as deforestation and the burning of fossil fuels, has released an incredible amount of greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, becoming a driving force in the rise in global average temperatures over the past couple of centuries.
Carbon and Aircraft Carriers
(Photo by Hugo Jehanne, from Unsplash.)
There is a strong scientific consensus that humans have been instrumental in recent climate change. The NASA website asserts that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, “a group of 1,300 independent scientific experts from countries all over the world under the auspices of the United Nations,” has agreed that “there’s a more than 95 percent probability that human activities over the past 50 years have warmed out planet.” In that same vein, the IPCC estimates with “high confidence” in their Special 2018 Report that humans have caused “approximately 1.0°C of global warming above pre-industrial levels.”
That one degree may not sound like much, but it signifies an enormous amount of greenhouse gas emissions, and it has a great impact. In their Fifth Assessment Report, the IPCC records that human carbon dioxide emissions grew an average of 0.4 gigatonnes per year between 1970 and 2000, then more than doubled to an increase of 1 gigatonne per year between 2000 and 2010. For perspective, NASA estimates that a single gigatonne weighs as much as “10,000 fully-loaded U.S. aircraft carriers.” If we apply that measure to the IPCC’s estimate for our carbon output in 2010 (49 gigatonnes), then we find that we dumped the weight of 490,000 aircraft carriers into the atmosphere in that one year alone.
If done right, human industry can yield great benefits for the human and extra-human world alike, but through the current structure of our lives and economies (and the moral failings that they tend to reflect), we’ve prompted an array of dangerous shifts in the global ecosystem.
Degrees of Disaster
That single degree of change in global climate has serious implications for life on earth. As climate change progresses, it increases the probability and severity of issues such as insect outbreaks, wildfires, droughts, heat waves, and hurricanes, and it also contributes to the mass extinction of countless animals. The rising ocean levels, resulting from glacial melt and warming seawater, will add greater stress to coastal ecosystems and threaten human populations with an increased risk of severe floods and storms. To be clear, climate change does not “cause” these sorts of extreme weather events, but it does (as stated earlier) make them more frequent and intense.
We’ve already experienced some of these impacts. Climate change has initiated an increase in intense rainfall events, record high temperatures, and ocean acidification, and in a 2020 New York Times article, Somini Sengupta gives the specific examples of “a three-month-long flood in the Florida Keys, wildfires across a record hot and dry Australia,” and “deadly heat waves in Europe.” If we fail to hold climate change in check, these sorts of problems will only increase.
Striving for Wholeness
Some critics accuse climate change activists of being alarmists, self-proclaimed prophets of human extinction. From what I’ve read, I’m not sure to what extent human existence is at risk, but what we do know is that climate change is a grave shift for the worse. If left unchecked, it will yield a great deal of death and suffering for human and non-human creatures across the globe, so we must rally a unified effort to stop it.
According to the IPCC in their 2018 Special Report, we can prevent climate change’s worst effects if we limit global warming to 1.5°C. To do this, we must lower human-induced carbon emissions by about 45 percent by 2030, then attain net-zero emissions by 2050. To be clear, when the scientists say “net-zero,” they really do mean zero. We don’t just need to “cut back” a bit on our emissions, but to truly transform our social systems, to the point that any carbon emissions that we put out are removed by other methods.
This is an intimidating goal, but it’s necessary to protect the human and extra-human world, and there are several concrete ways that we can begin to reduce our emissions. (For a helpful image of ten ways our communities can do that, scroll to the fifth section of this article from the World Resources Institute. I intend to focus more on specific climate solutions in future posts.) At our best, humans are highly creative and influential beings, and if we unite and resolve to protect ourselves and future generations, I believe that we can reach net-zero emissions by 2050. The main question is whether we can unify in time.
Over the past year, a lot of people came together in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic, because so many lives were (and still are) at stake. For the sake of protecting those lives, we were willing to find creative solutions, and to restructure all our typical ways of socializing, educating, working, and living.
If we can unify in a similar (or better) way over climate change, I believe we would do much more than simply “stop the world from falling apart.” We would find the opportunity to design and enact a world of wholeness—cycles of energy, food, money, labor, and natural resources that enable humanity and nature to support and nourish one another—and that’s the kind of world I want to pass on to future generations.
Further Reading
NASA on the Evidence, Causes, and Solutions of Climate Change: https://climate.nasa.gov/
Britannica on Climate Change: https://www.britannica.com/science/climate-change
IPCC 2018 Special Report on the Global Warming of 1.5°C: https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/chapter/spm/
World Resources Institute: “What Does ‘Net-Zero Emissions’ Mean?”: https://www.wri.org/blog/2019/09/what-does-net-zero-emissions-mean-6-common-questions-answered
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