Climate Change - Explained
“The greatest threat to our planet is the belief that someone else will save it.”
The legitimacy of climate change is often a topic up for debate due to political affiliations and personal beliefs. It is often misunderstood, misconstrued, and used as a weapon but it is truly a relatively common sense concept that’s easily grasped. Climate change is real, but maybe not for the reasons you think.
Earth’s geological history is marked by changes in temperature unaffected by incidental human intervention. That does not mean humans have not a large part to play in our rising temperatures, though. Climate change is a naturally occurring geological and atmospheric process that has been happening since the beginning of time. It is largely tied to the natural rise and decrease of greenhouse gases carbon dioxide, methane, fluorinated gases, and though not a greenhouse gas, water vapor. Earth has a tumultuous history plagued with highly unstable conditions. It has seen periods of intense, scorching heat, and ice ages lasting millions of years.
It’s not about rising temperatures, it’s about how fast they’re rising
We have never before seen temperatures skyrocketing like they are today. Since 1800, the average global temperatures have risen 2.5°. This may seem like an inconsequential rise, but it is not. During the early stages of the Tithonian age, or about 150 million years ago, earth’s temperature rose only 5° over a 15 million year time period, or about .00003%. In 220 years, temperatures have risen 1.14%. Figuring based off a consistent, current rate of change, it will take us at our current pace only 1000 years to rise 5°. However, the rising temperatures cannot be predicted based on the current model as they grow exponentially as the temperatures continue to rise.
Methane and Carbon in the Permafrost
Permafrost is soil that remains frozen year-round. It accounts for one quarter of landmass in the northern hemisphere and is the largest natural methane reservoir on the planet. Mentioned previously, methane and greenhouse gases are far more efficient at capturing the sun's energy and reradiating it inside our atmosphere. As temperatures rise more permafrost is melted resulting in higher levels of naturally released methane in the atmosphere, further warming the planet. The scientific models predicting future climate is based off an exponentially growing rate of change. In short, the more temperature rises, the faster it will rise.
Man Induced Climate Change
The industrial revolution is the main cause of modern-day global warming. The burning of fossil fuels releases carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas into the atmosphere and can remain there for centuries. When one hears the term industrial revolution what might come to mind is often a picture of early factories with black smoke rolling from their stacks, because that is all we have been led to understand. The industrial revolution has also had a major impact on sustainability, further increasing the risk of irreversible climate change. By our modern-day standards, these factories were primitive. Carbon neutrality does not mean simply producing a product from entirely recycled material. There are hundreds of steps to large industrial complex, including gathering raw materials, production, logistics, and distribution. For instance, a railroad tie production facility during Americas westward expansion would have an extremely high demand for lumber, requiring large old growth forests being clear cut for their timber. Global large scale industrial logging is clear cutting our most precious resource, the lungs of our planet. Every year, the Amazon loses 80 million acres of forest, equal to the size of New Mexico, further reducing the threshold amount of greenhouse gas our planet can absorb.
What can be done?
A commitment to clean energy can slowly begin to reverse the effects of global large-scale industrialization, if the industrial chain leading to clean energy is not soiled by toxic industrial waste and greenhouse gas emission. If, for instance, producing one windmill blade produced 10,000 gallons of toxic wastewater, the offset for clean energy would be a hard bargain to drive. However, if the production of one windmill in its entirety was carbon neutral or even marginally carbon positive, the case for renewables would start to make more sense to the public. Either way, as a global entity, we are on the precipice of the point of no return. The scale in which the time we have to act before it’s irreversible not measured in decades, possibly not even years, but months.
