Happy Monday, friends!
This week is the first of three posts in which I’ll be breaking down a controversial topic that has been floating around in the news, especially in the last few months: climate change and carbon pricing. In general, carbon pricing is a “solution” that governments have started using to combat climate change by reducing their country’s emissions while stimulating the economy. To understand carbon pricing, firstly you must have a strong understanding of climate change. In this post, I will give you a straightforward explanation of what climate change actually is and how we can measure it. Next week I will discuss the most important points of climate change history and how this has currently impacted our efforts. The third post will cover carbon pricing, a controversial way to challenge climate change to meet our emission reduction goals.
I’ve wanted to write about this topic for some time. As I started researching and writing up the post, I realized that this topic is too dense to discuss in just one post. Not only would it be a crazy long post, but it would also be so content heavy that you probably couldn’t absorb much of the information. I tried splitting it up into two posts, but even that was too overwhelming. That’s why I’ve decided to split it up into three parts. This way, I can put all of my energy into each of the posts, instead of making one long post where I put all of my focus into the first part and then let it fade as the post continued.
Without further ado, on to the topic for today: what is climate change?
It’s safe to say that most of us think that climate change is a problem. However, I don’t think that society as a whole can claim to fully understand climate change and its impacts. I want to make sense of this topic for you, while educating you on the importance of paying attention to this statement that environmentalists, scientists, politicians and the media constantly make: Climate change is a problem. This is not fake news.
How do we define climate change? This complex process involves the rise in average global temperatures over a period of time; note the difference between climate and weather is that weather is a day-to-day local change, while climate is from a long-term, large-scale perspective. Rising global temperatures create countless environmental, social and economic problems. Ocean acidification, ozone depletion, biodiversity loss, eutrophication and other environmental issues occur ever-increasingly around the world. Natural disasters like floods, hurricanes, earthquakes and tsunamis are increasing both in frequency and severity. As a result of these environmental issues, marginalized communities (mainly the impoverished, developing areas) suffer from a lack of food, sanitary water, and safety as they live in middle of civil war zones, battles which occur over depleting resource pools.
Yes, earth’s climate does naturally change, and has done so since the beginning of time: the planet warms and cools, natural disasters hit and keep the populations at sustainable levels, causing some species to go extinct while allowing other species to evolve. However, these changes occur over thousands to hundreds of thousands or even millions of years, not nearly as frequently as they have in the past hundred and fifty years since the industrial revolution. In addition, they have occurred in cycles, such as the freeze-thaw cycle of an ice age. As far as science can tell us, temperatures are continuing to rise to record levels, with no sign of cooling in sight.
Rapid industrialization provided us with the tools needed to extract and use more natural resources than ever before. Before this time, resources were used at sustainable levels, or not used at all. For instance, nomadic human tribes hunted for food as needed. They respected the species they shared the planet with, and did not overexploit them. They could not carry a herd of animal carcasses on their backs, so they only killed what they needed at that time before moving on. Nowadays, humans live a domestic, sedentary lifestyle. Factory farms have distorted the way we value our animal friends; technological advancements can wipe out an entire population in a few seconds.
Another human advancement resulting from the industrial revolution was learning how to extract and burn fossil fuels. Fossil fuels are simply dead organisms that fossilized millions of years ago and are buried deep beneath the surface of the earth. These fossils act as an energy storage surplus; they are some of the most energy-abundant fuels available, yet hold the potential to be the most damaging to our planet. Humans continue to develop ways to extract and use these fossil fuels at ever-accelerating rates, creating energy in the form of coal, oil and natural gas.
Why are they so damaging? Fossils are composed mainly of carbon. When these fuels are burned for energy, a chemical reaction occurs to turn this carbon into carbon dioxide, which is released into the atmosphere.
Carbon is a naturally occurring element in nearly every living and non-living thing in the universe. Although we have an abundant source of carbon in the ground, air and oceans, the earth is very sensitive to this natural element. Our oceans act as a carbon sink, meaning that they can absorb carbon from the atmosphere. The ocean can be saturated with carbon, though, which just like a cup of coffee that you poured too much sugar in, the carbon cannot dissolve any more and therefore cannot absorb any more. For this reason, our oceans, the lithosphere and the atmosphere have specific levels of carbon that each can absorb at one time in order to function at a healthy level.
Especially in the atmosphere, this level can fluctuate throughout the year. At the end of the day, though, the atmosphere wants to reach homeostasis (its healthy level) so the planetary cycles can function optimally. Think of the human body: our body has an optimal temperature, specific requirements for different vitamins and nutrients, and more. Too much or too little of one of these things can throw our body out of whack: we get sick, our nervous system or digestive system shuts down. Until we can reach homeostasis again, our body will continue to react this way until we return to our optimal levels. The planet is exactly like the human body. Right now, the atmosphere (and soon enough the oceans) contain too much carbon, shifting it out of its homeostasis. This can lead to disaster.
Presently, there is too much carbon dioxide (the gaseous form of carbon) in our atmosphere. This is a problem because carbon dioxide absorbs infrared radiation, which is energy in the form of heat that comes from the sun. For this reason, carbon dioxide is known as a greenhouse gas. It traps heat and warms the planet, much like how a greenhouse traps heat to warm the room. Heat can come in, but it cannot escape.
Essentially, the balance between the amount of energy coming into the atmosphere and the amount of energy leaving the atmosphere determines how our climate will change. A certain amount of this infrared radiation needs to escape our atmosphere to keep our global temperature stable. The earth naturally absorbs some of the sun’s incoming solar radiation. It reflects some as well, which is meant to escape the atmosphere. Things like clouds and, not surprisingly, greenhouse gases, prevent this reflected radiation from escaping. As the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increases, more infrared radiation is trapped. More infrared trapped = more heat = higher temperatures.
How do we measure how much infrared is trapped? There are a few mechanisms that can help us do this. One is radiative forcing, which numerically represents the change in energy in our atmosphere as a result of greenhouse gas emissions. If the number, expressed in watts per metre squared, is greater than 0, that means that the planet is warming. Less than 0 means that it is cooling.
Radiative forcing is calculated by subtracting the outgoing (escaped) radiation from the incoming radiation (coming from the sun, towards earth). Currently, our outgoing radiation is 237.9 W/m2, while our incoming radiation is 240.5 W/m2, making for a radiative forcing number of 2.6 W/m2, give or take a few decimals depending on the data source. In other words, more heat is entering our atmosphere than what is leaving, so greenhouse gases are causing the planet to heat up.
As mentioned, there is a homeostatic or “healthy” level of carbon that can be present in our atmosphere at one time. Staying at this level will allow for planetary systems to function at their best. Another way of looking at this is to think of the atmosphere having a carbon dioxide “threshold,” where as long as we’re below this threshold the planetary systems will function effectively.
We’ve already measured how energy entering and leaving the atmosphere will impact our climate. How can we tie carbon dioxide levels into this, and how do we know what the “threshold” is? That’s easy: we measure the concentration of carbon in the atmosphere at a given time, and using scientific technology, we can determine what an “irreversible” concentration of carbon would be.
To understand how our atmosphere is changing, we’ll look at carbon concentrations before and after the industrial revolution. Just before the industrial revolution in the 1800s, the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 280 ppm (parts per million). During the last ice age, this level was around 180 ppm. Seems like a dramatic difference, right? These levels naturally decrease in the winter because carbon dioxide is trapped inside of ice. Levels then increase in the spring as ice melts, releasing carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere. They don’t change as dramatically as going from 280 ppm to 180 ppm, but keep in mind the last ice age was way before the industrial revolution and atmospheric carbon gradually increased as time went on. This increase was nothing like what we see now, though. I am simply using these numbers as reference points to compare it to what our current carbon state looks like.
While the concentration of atmospheric carbon does naturally increase throughout the year, it falls just as quickly. Today’s concern is that these levels are rising 100 times faster than they did since the end of the last ice age. In less than two-hundred years, we have surpassed 280 ppm of atmospheric carbon greatly. September 2016 marks a moment in climate change history, in which we created irreversible damage by passing our carbon threshold: atmospheric carbon dioxide levels reached 400 ppm. Even when levels fall in the winter, they will never fall below 400 ppm ever again, at least in our lifetime and almost certainly never in the next few hundred years. Burning fossil fuels has been a major source of this atmospheric carbon, increasing the amount in our atmosphere faster than we can predict the damages it will cause. From what we’ve seen already, though, nothing good will come out of this. Even worse, in 2017 we hit concentrations of 410 ppm for the first time in history, climbing ten units in less than a year. At this rate, we may hit 500 ppm soon. Who knows how that will impact the planet?
Despite recent efforts to cut emissions and decrease our atmospheric carbon, current results are negligible. In the diagram below, the concentration of atmospheric carbon is depicted, along with the most recent concentration recorded on July 20 2018. While this level is below 410 ppm, this is not a result of emission reduction efforts but just a natural cyclical fluctuation in carbon levels; while levels rise and fall on a macro scale (annually), they also fluctuate on a micro scale (daily).
Okay, the planet is warming. What does that mean? Well, remember how I said that the carbon cycle tries to stay in homeostasis? That goes for the rest of the planetary cycles, as well. Any small change in the environment impacts each and every one of these systems.
The oceans, for example: increasing atmospheric temperatures causes the oceans to warm up, too. A warmer environment, even by half a degree, can be too severe for some species living in that environment that require very specific conditions. Hotter temperatures may cause the ocean water to evaporate more, contributing to greater rainfall. Greenhouse gases can combine with water vapour to create acid rain. Increased temperatures can also cause droughts, or dry up the land in areas that typically don’t get as much rain. Polar ice caps are melting, species that require cooler temperatures are migrating north to escape the warmth; climate change effects every system, everywhere. This is not just about us having a warmer summer with crazy storms. There is a much bigger issue at hand, and it’s here, now.
Let’s recap what we’ve learned so far. We now know that climate examines the average weather patterns over a long period of time, and that rising global temperatures are causing irreversible damage in all aspects of life. We know that our emissions are increasing the concentration of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere to dangerous levels, trapping solar radiation from escaping, increasing global temperatures by doing so. These changing temperatures can impact everything from soil quality to ocean pH to population size.
Now that you have a basic understanding of climate change, you’re probably thinking, “okay, we have all of these problems. Isn’t something being done to deal with them?” The short answer is yes. The longer answer, which I will get into in the next post, is yes, but not in a wholly successful manner.
I hope that you enjoyed this introduction to climate change, and now understand that climate change is something to taking absolutely seriously. Yes, climate change is a crisis, and we need to deal with it as soon as possible.
Enjoy the rest of your week, and I’ll see you next week to talk about how, exactly, we are dealing with the crisis, and how we haven’t been so successful thus far.
Until next time!