A rising global temperature is no joking matter, but one has to wonder when the president of the annual UN conference on climate change is also the head of an oil company. My father liked to joke in his typical impish style, “I’ve seen a lot of changes in my time … and I was against them all.” There are also hundreds of apt lightbulb-changing jokes, such as “How many Irish mothers does it take to screw in a lightbulb? … Ah sure you go out and have a good time, I’ll just stay here in the dark.” Indeed, change is never easy, whether denial about the need, overriding the status quo of a multi-trillion-dollar, carbon-spewing industry that underpins the entire global economy, or challenging the ongoing inanity of oil and gas companies pretending to “transition away” from fossil fuels.
Established by the UN in 1988 to assess the science, impacts, and risk of climate change, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has now written 6 reports, which make for increasingly alarming reading. The latest iteration, the Synthesis Report for the Sixth Assessment (AR6), states at the outset that “Global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase, with unequal historical and ongoing contributions arising from unsustainable energy use, land use and land-use change, lifestyles and patterns of consumption and production across regions, between and within countries, and among individuals.”[1] And yet, there are those who still pretend not to believe in a human contribution, purposely undermine change, or just don’t give a damn.
The French mathematician Joseph Fourier (1768-1830), Anglo-Irish physicist John Tyndall (1820-1893), and Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius (1859-1927) all helped to establish the now well-known, heat-trapping properties of water vapor, carbon dioxide (CO2), and methane (CH4). Fourier noted that the temperature change between night and day (and winter and summer) was minimal because of an insulating atmospheric blanket of “greenhouse gases” (GHGs), a term he coined. If not for our GHG-filled atmosphere, our “pale blue dot” of a planet would be uninhabitably cold. Tyndall noted that varying amounts of GHGs could be responsible for past ice ages – evidence of which was only recently discovered in his time in the scarred glacial landscapes of northern Europe – after setting up his own “artificial sky in a tube” in the basement of London’s Royal Institution. Arrhenius established the first direct link between GHGs and temperature, for which he is mostly remembered today. Thanks in part to Arrhenius’s analysis, it was known by the early 1900s that burning coal would produce enough atmospheric carbon dioxide to raise global temperatures beyond safe limits.
As noted in a 1912 Popular Mechanics article, the atmosphere at the time contained 1.5 trillion tons of CO2, which would double in two centuries at the then industrial emission rates, “unless it is removed by some means in enormous quantities.”[2] Alas, Popular Mechanics couldn’t have anticipated the extraordinary growth of the fossil-fuel industry in the twentieth century as emissions doubled faster (40 years at 1.5 trillion tons/37 billion tons per year). Currently the amount is over 422 parts per million and increasing by about 2 ppm per year[3] (2 ppm is also annually absorbed in the oceans and biomass).
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In a 1975 Science article “Climactic change: Are we on the brink of a pronounced global warming?” Columbia University geophysicist Wallace Broecker introduced the term “global warming,” noting that man-made carbon dioxide (and now methane) would soon contribute to an exponential rise in global temperatures as indeed is occurring.
Many of those who support the continued status quo of an unchecked global petroleum industry claim the increase in temperature is due to natural changes in the earth-sun distance (eccentricity, tilt, and precession), regularly rising and falling. Indeed, the sun’s irradiance on earth is cyclical, giving us intermittent ice ages and interglacial periods (more pronounced in the larger land-mass northern hemisphere), albeit over millennial-long timeframes.
Today’s increased heating, however, is coming faster and more furiously because of industrial carbon-burning, too much for earth’s ecosystems to handle. If we don’t change soon, more heating, more melting, and more flooding will put us all in uncharted (and rising) waters. Space is not the final frontier for earth-bound humans, change is.
Bill McKibben, co-founder of the “350.org” group (the name derived from NASA’s projected safe threshold for CO2 levels), has estimated that 80% of fossil fuels must remain in the ground to avoid the worst. Although McKibben believes that changing to LED light bulbs and putting a price on carbon are both excellent ideas (among others), more than $20 trillion worth of stored “carbon bombs” around the world will wreck the planet if they are dug up and burnt (e.g., Arctic and Caspian Sea oil, Eastern European fracked gas, Canadian and Venezuelan oil sands, and Western Australian, Indonesian, Chinese, and Powder River Basin coal[4]), sending the atmosphere spiralling well beyond the 400-ppm mark.
The 350.org group cites major achievements in its goal to “keep it in the ground” — such as stopping the Keystone XL pipeline (only 3% of Alberta oil sands extracted), shutting down development in the world’s largest coal mine (in Queensland, Australia’s Galilee Valley), and a growing fossil-fuel divestment campaign started in 2012 at Unity College in Maine, which first sold off fossil-fuel stocks in its own $13-million portfolio, and now includes universities around the world, significantly impacting the bottom lines of companies with fossil-fuel investments.
And still some wonder about the causes and effects. Initially skeptical about anthropomorphic global warming (AGW), Berkeley physics professor Richard Muller showed how climate and weather can easily be misconstrued. His research team extended the temperature record back to 1753, using station data and “proxies” such as tree rings and choral growth. His Berkeley results corroborated IPCC data, but importantly tied the increase in the average global temperature to an unmistakable increase in atmospheric CO2. As Muller stated in Energy for Future Presidents: The science behind the headlines, “The exquisite agreement between the warming and CO2 suggests that most – maybe all – of the warming of the past 250 years was caused by humans.”[5] Furthermore, the Berkeley analysis showed no correlation to sunspot activity, and predicted a further increase of 1.6 °C every 40 years if we continue to burn carbon-based fuels as we have been doing.
John K. White, a former lecturer in physics and education at University College Dublin and the University of Oviedo. He is the editor of the energy news service E21NS.
Source: CounterPunch