Climate Change
Let's face it, most of us aren't scientists. We don't have the training and expertise to confirm or deny climate change on our own. Yet, if what is now being referred to as "Climate Change" is real, we owe ourselves the chance to act in self-defense, the supposed odds of mankind surviving are being portrayed by some as pretty low within short decades. We're talking a lifetime. It could be longer, but some scientists tell us that human life is near extinction without our concerted effort to tackle climate change now. We're not talking saving the planet, we're talking saving life on Earth. Yet, other climate scientists have less dire predictions, like Judith Curry who argues that the climate science "consensus" is based on unrealistic assumptions about the Earth’s climate and the ability of human societies to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.[cc-1]
Science has enabled us to get people to the moon and back, to land a vehicle on Mars and send marvelous information back to us to explore, and to stop the depletion of ozone in the Earth's atmosphere. Ozone layer depletion causes increased UV radiation levels at the Earth's surface, which is damaging to human health.
If we trust science to lead us to actions to diminish the negative effects of climate change, we'll have abundant renewable energy sources, sustainable products, and lifestyle changes that can globally improve our quality of life. Most of all, it may just save human life from extinction. There may be some rough going, but the end result will likely be better. On the other hand, if we ignore the climate science, our greed may give us a few years of easy living, yet create a dismal future for those who live after us, all the while harming some millions of unfortunate people now living in areas most significantly and negatively affected by climate change. Yet, other scientists are not to sure that Climate Change is the crisis described above. Herein, we try to explore both sides of the story.
A History of Climate Change
The Keeling curve is one of the first significant indicators of climate changing in response to human activity. Charles David Keeling was an American scientist whose recordings of carbon dioxide at the Mauna Loa Observatory, started in 1958, raised the possibility of anthropogenic (significant human) contribution to the "greenhouse effect" and global warming. Many scientists have since studied CO2 as it relates to climate change and in 1988, the United Nations (UN) was afraid that, cumulatively, human activities on a global scale were introducing CO2 into the atmosphere at a rate that was changing earth's climate with harmful implications.
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The UN then endorsed the establishment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Its initial task, was to prepare a comprehensive review and recommendations
with respect to the state of knowledge of the science of climate change. The 2019 report, United in Science, includes details on the state of the climate and presents trends in the emissions and atmospheric concentrations of the main greenhouse gases (GHG). It highlights the urgency of fundamental socio-economic transformation in key sectors such as land use and energy in order to avert dangerous global temperature increase with potentially irreversible impacts. It also examines tools to support both mitigation and adaptation. Mitigation is the process of reducing the amount of greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere, while adaptation is the process of adjusting to the effects of climate change.
This IPCC report was updated in 2022 with Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability.
The Keeling curve: an early indicator of climate changing under human influence through increasing atmospheric CO2 - keelingcurve.ucsd.edu
2019 IPPC Report United in Science stresses urgency of climate action
Simply put, this 2019 IPCC report stresses the need for immediate actions across the globe to save humanity from worsening climatic effects, and sometimes disastrous and likely irreparable harms. Global warming is one of the effects of climate change likely to cause harm to much of Earth's human population, yet some areas may experience benefits not emphasized in the IPPC reports. Global warming is caused when GHGs trap heat in the atmosphere. IPCC reports focus on the harmful effects were the global temperature to rise 1.5 or 2 degrees Celcius, or more, above pre-industrial levels.
Projected change in average annual temperature over the period 2071-2099 (compared to the period 1971-2000) under a low scenario that assumes rapid reductions in emissions and concentrations of heat-trapping gases (RCP 2.6), and a higher scenario that assumes continued increases in emissions (RCP 8.5).
Source: Quanrud, David & Vafai, H. & Parivar, P. & Sehatkashani, Saviz. (2015). Resilience Thinking for Adaptation of Cities to Climate Change.
Climate on Earth is much more than global average temperature or annual rainfall. Solar radiation, precipitation, wind patterns, sea levels, temperature, and moisture content all relate to climate and are significant for human life.
Many interactions influence climate. For example, radiation from the Sun, the ability of the ground surface to reflect sunlight, ocean temperatures, and the ability of the atmosphere to retain heat, all play a part in these interactions. Seemingly insignificant changes in any one of these influences can cause a domino effect to shift the Earth’s climate. The extent to which it shifts or changes, depends on whether the various individual influences contribute to, or reduce, the effect over many seasons -- say 30 years.
The study of Climate Change is a very complex study. The complex interactions and feedbacks on such a large scale make this study very challenging. Much data needs to be collected and analyzed in an ever changing puzzle.
We all know that weather changes. Sunny days, rainy days, cold and hot days and for some of us, snowy days are indicative of weather. Weather patterns over much longer periods of time than a day, week or year will cumulatively define a particular climate. And yes, climate does change, even without human assistance. However, the big question suggested by the current idiom ‘climate change’ is, “Have greenhouse gases been created and are they now being created as a result of human industrialization, causing a global warming with short term disastrous effects? Or, are current changes in climate part of the natural processes and cycles of earth in its cosmic environment?”
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No matter what the answers are, being green today is still very important. If humans have had little influence on climate change (best case), being green will still contribute towards sustainable human life on Earth by helping to preserve our needed and precious resources. If we are contributing to a hazardous climate change (a very contentious issue), then acting green (conservative) is decidedly more important. In any case, there is no downside to behaving green. Simply stated, “Waste not, want not.” Or, what have you got to lose. Were the effects of climate change to turn out to be negligible, acting green would help you prioritize the important things in your life and avoid the waste associated with pursuing, in the long term, unrewarding aspirations, whatever they be. That being said, as current science seems to suggest that man is causing seriously harmful Climate Change -- we'll lean toward the precautionary stance; however, we'll still be open to science that suggests Climate Change is not immanently dangerous -- with the caution that overuse of Earth's resources is dangerous itself.
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Climate is related to weather in the sense that it uses historical weather data to suggest typical temperature and precipitation conditions for a geographical region over a period of time. In the words of Andrew Weaver, “… climate is what you expect. Weather is what you get.”
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Climate Change signifies a change in the average pattern of weather that can be identified by changes in its properties (e.g., temperature, precipitation, humidity, sunshine) over a period of decades. The World Meteorological Organization uses a 30 year period for averaging these variables. Climate change may be due to natural processes, external forcings, or more recently, attributed to anthropogenic modification of the atmosphere or land use.
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Over the period 1880 to 2012, the globally averaged combined land and ocean surface temperature data as calculated by a linear trend show a warming of 0.85 [0.65 to 1.06] °C. Berkeley Earth analysis shows that the rise in average world land surface temperature is approximately 1.5 degrees C in the past 250 years, and about 0.9 degrees C in the past 50 years. [cc-2]
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At this point in the conversation, rather than dig deeper into understanding Climate Change, we'll talk solutions. Acting swiftly to mitigate the imminent severity of the impacts of CO2 on Climate Change seems imperative. We should act now! Can we weather the storms?
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A recent book, The Case for Climate Capitalism, sheds some light on Climate Change and helps us think about our response to it. As the author, Tom Rand, suggests, "We can't solve climate change, but we can still head off the worst." [cc-3]
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On one hand, Rand suggests, we cannot possibly transition off fossil fuels and other major contributors to a warming planet without the financial might and entrepreneurial talent market forces unleash.
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On the other hand, we need to reign in the market
forces that have led to our climate conundrum/challenge.
Rand states that Climate change (disruption) defies the traditional divisions of left and right. The far left, led by Naomi Klein, targets market forces, economic growth, and capitalism itself as the enemy. Yet climate solutions need all three. The far right, dominated by market fundamentalists like FOX News and the Koch brothers, view unfettered markets, unlimited growth, and unregulated capitalism as established foundations of the twenty-first century. But a livable planet won't live well under those practices. The simple ideologies of left and right don't enable a cooperative solution to the problem. Somewhere in the middle, a fairly quiet group, the Centrists — including many business leaders, economists, and editorial page contributors — finally have begun to assert themselves, as the climate crisis looms. Yet this group remains reluctant to endorse the kind of severe change in direction required to temper the coming storms. The centrist position can't hold. Today's emission levels make climate risk simply too untenable. If you're a moderate on action, you get extreme climate disruption. To quote Rand, "Common sense provides a better basis for climate solutions than political or ideological preference." Yet, common sense may not always reflect the truth. It can be problematic as a source of information because there's no guarantee about its original source, and people may mistakenly trust it due to hindsight bias, overconfidence, or a tendency to see order in random events. Perhaps we should trust the science.
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Commerce is the tool, human values the force, to retool our laws and institutions to reflect our collective long-term security. Rewiring existing economic systems to lower climate risk could not be a more centrist notion. Yet it's increasingly seen as radical, by the new left because it fails to reject capitalism outright, and by the new right because it implies massive market interventions. Our respective dogmas prevent the consensus needed to build a new economy that will get us safely through the century. These entrenched positions preclude finding workable solutions. Political populist movements such as the November 2024 U.S. Presidential election may seriously affect the ability to honestly research Climate Change and address it.
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Climate Capitalism is a set of pragmatic solutions to mitigate what could be the greatest risk we face this century. Climate Capitalism urges us to find common ground to tackle this problem now for good, our good - and well-being.
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Many Canadians who were born in the mid to late twentieth century practically won the lottery — it was one of the greatest times and places to come into being in human history. The massive economic expansion of the late twentieth century delivered remarkable employment and wealth opportunities. New technology brought better health care, cleaner air, and an endless array of new toys. Globalization brought down their cost. Food security seemed guaranteed. Cracks occasionally appeared as energy demand soared and the geopolitics of oil got nasty, but resource scarcity was something that we thought of as happening elsewhere, to others. The promise of unfettered growth is that one day, everyone might share this optimism that the future would be even better with this growth. However, growth powered by burning fossil fuels is a deal with the devil. "We face a paradox: the very market forces that created so much wealth now brings levels of climate risk that threaten economic security, even our civic structures." Business as usual likely takes us well past the nominally safe level of 2°C of warming [cc-4] and into very hostile territory. It's not a stretch to say climate disruption is the endgame of industrial civilization. Yet complacency can make us oblivious to the urgency.
Technology is unstoppable once it gets going. Its sweeping changes are clear in hindsight, the engines of the industrial revolution; the microchips of the data revolution; the genetic and stem cell manipulations that herald a new era of human health. Similarly, clean energy technology, or cleantech, is igniting an energy revolution. Instead of digging up and burning stuff buried in the ground, technology will harness and store endless supplies of renewable energy. It's unlikely that most cars will use internal combustion engines for much longer. The economic dynamism at the dawn of the twenty-first century feels unstoppable. The potential of the creative class seems unbounded. The human spirit runs hot. But so does the planet!
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Climate risk is qualitatively different from other threats. A climate crisis could be effectively permanent. The ongoing instability of an overheated planet could last longer than we've had an industrial civilization. As a threat multiplier, it aggravates all other crises: food security, economic, social, warfare, even pandemic. The only risks comparable in outcome are those of a nuclear winter or an aberrant asteroid. Rand uses "climate disruption" in lieu of "climate change" to emphasize this permanence.
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In principle, this is a technical problem: our task is to rebuild global energy systems and transition to a low-carbon economy. It's perfectly doable. Sufficient capital sits in pension funds and money-market accounts. The engineering and entrepreneurial talent is fired up and ready to go. Will you take supportive action? It will take our individual ethics, support and actions to get it done.
See the Economics page on this site.
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[cc-5] IPCC
The Greenhouse Effect
It is common to visualize and express the heating of the Earth's atmosphere as the greenhouse effect. In the words of the IPCC, this effect is explained: "The Sun powers Earth’s climate, radiating energy at very short wavelengths, predominately in the visible or near-visible (e.g., ultraviolet) part of the spectrum. Roughly one-third of the solar energy that reaches the top of Earth’s atmosphere is reflected directly back to space. The remaining two-thirds is absorbed by the surface and, to a lesser extent, by the atmosphere. To balance the absorbed incoming energy, the Earth must, on average, radiate the same amount of energy back to space. Because the Earth is much colder than the Sun, it radiates at much longer wavelengths, primarily in the infrared part of the spectrum (see Figure 1). Much of this thermal radiation emitted by the land and ocean is absorbed by the atmosphere, including clouds, and reradiated back to Earth. This is called the greenhouse effect. The glass walls in a greenhouse reduce airflow and increase the temperature of the air inside. Analogously, but through a different physical process, the Earth’s greenhouse effect warms the surface of the planet. Without the natural greenhouse effect, the average temperature at Earth’s surface would be below the freezing point of water. Thus, Earth’s natural greenhouse effect makes life as we know it possible. However, human activities, primarily the [excessive] burning of fossil fuels and [often needless] clearing of forests, have greatly intensified the natural greenhouse effect, causing global warming.'
Figure 1. An idealised model of the natural greenhouse effect
'The two most abundant gases in the atmosphere, nitrogen (comprising 78% of the dry atmosphere) and oxygen (comprising 21%), exert almost no greenhouse effect. Instead, the greenhouse effect comes from molecules that are more complex and much less common. Water vapour is the most important greenhouse gas, and carbon dioxide (CO2) is the second-most important one. Methane, nitrous oxide, ozone and several other gases present in the atmosphere in small amounts also contribute to the greenhouse effect. In the humid equatorial regions, where there is so much water vapour in the air that the greenhouse effect is very large, adding a small additional amount of CO2 or water vapour has only a small direct impact on downward infrared radiation. However, in the cold, dry polar regions, the effect of a small increase in CO2 or water vapour is much greater. The same is true for the cold, dry upper atmosphere where a small increase in water vapour has a greater influence on the greenhouse effect than the same change in water vapour would have near the surface.'
'Several components of the climate system, notably the oceans and living things, affect atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases. A prime example
of this is plants taking CO2 out of the atmosphere and converting it (and water) into carbohydrates via photosynthesis. In the industrial era, human activities have added greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, primarily through the burning of fossil fuels and clearing of forests. "Adding more of a greenhouse gas, such as CO2, to the atmosphere intensifies the greenhouse effect, thus warming Earth’s climate. The amount of warming depends on various feedback mechanisms. For example, as the atmosphere warms due to rising levels of greenhouse gases, its concentration of water vapour increases, further intensifying the greenhouse effect. This in turn causes more warming, which causes an additional increase in water vapour, in a self-reinforcing cycle. This water vapour feedback may be strong enough to approximately double the increase in the greenhouse effect due to the added CO2 alone." [cc-6]
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The IPPC reports break down Climate change with various situations and scenerios described as low, moderate, or high confidence. Sometimes this relates to the interpretation of the scientific data and, at other times, to the predictive models of future climatic effects.
For example, "A.2 Widespread and rapid changes in the atmosphere, ocean, cryosphere and biosphere have occurred. Human-caused climate change is already affecting many weather and climate extremes in every region across the globe. This has led to widespread adverse impacts and related losses and damages to nature and people (high confidence). Vulnerable communities who have historically contributed the least to current climate change are disproportionately affected (high confidence). {2.1, Table 2.1, Figure 2.2 and 2.3} (Figure SPM.1) A.2.1 It is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land. Global mean sea level increased by 0.20 [0.15–0.25] m between 1901 and 2018. The average rate of sea level rise was 1.3 [0.6 to 2.1]mm yr-1 between 1901 and 1971, increasing to 1.9 [0.8 to 2.9] mm yr-1 between 1971 and 2006, and further increasing to 3.7 [3.2 to 4.2] mm yr-1 between 2006 and 2018 (high confidence). Human influence was very likely the main driver of these increases since at least 1971. Evidence of observed changes in extremes such as heatwaves, heavy precipitation, droughts, and tropical cyclones, and, in particular, their attribution to human influence, has further strengthened since AR5. Human influence has likely increased the chance of compound extreme events since the 1950s, including increases in the frequency of concurrent heatwaves and droughts (high confidence)."[cc-7]
"B.1.4 With further warming, every region is projected to increasingly experience concurrent and multiple changes in climatic impact-drivers. Compound heatwaves and droughts are projected to become more frequent, including concurrent events across multiple locations (high confidence). Due to relative sea level rise, current 1-in-100 year extreme sea level events are projected to occur at least annually in more than half of all tide gauge locations by 2100 under all considered scenarios (high confidence). Other projected regional changes include intensification of tropical cyclones and/or extratropical storms (medium confidence), and increases in aridity and fire weather (medium to high confidence) {3.1.1, 3.1.3} B.1.5 Natural variability will continue to modulate human-caused climate changes, either attenuating or amplifying projected changes, with little effect on centennial-scale global warming (high confidence). These modulations are important to consider in adaptation planning, especially at the regional scale and in the near term. If a large explosive volcanic eruption were to occur35, it would temporarily and partially mask humancaused climate change by reducing global surface temperature and pre-cipitation for one to three years (medium confidence)."[cc-8]
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Next: go to Climate Change 101
Footnotes
[cc-1] Climate Etc. May 26, 2024. Judith Curry. [accessed 2024 November 12].
[cc-2] http://berkeleyearth.org/summary-of-findings/ - accessed 19Oct06
[cc-4] Based on our current level of emissions, we're already commited to 1.5°C-2°C warming, and we're on a path of 5°C-6°C.
[cc-5] IPCC, 2022: Summary for Policymakers [H.-O. Pörtner, D.C. Roberts, E.S. Poloczanska, K. Mintenbeck, M. Tignor, A. Alegría, M. Craig, S. Langsdorf, S. Löschke, V. Möller, A. Okem (eds.)]. In: Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability. Contribution of Working Group II to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [H.-O. Pörtner, D.C. Roberts, M. Tignor, E.S. Poloczanska, K. Mintenbeck, A. Alegría, M. Craig, S. Langsdorf, S. Löschke, V. Möller, A. Okem, B. Rama (eds.)]. Cambridge University Press. In Press.
[cc-6] IPCC Fourth Assessment Report: Climate Change 2007: Working Group I: The Physical Science Basis FAQ 1.3 What is the Greenhouse Effect?
[cc-7] Based on 2500-year reconstructions, eruptions with a radiative forcing more negative than -1 Wm-2, related to the radiative effect of volcanic stratospheric aerosols in the literature assessed in this report, occur on average twice per century. {4.3}
[cc-8] Synthesis Report (SYR) of the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report (AR6)