Climate-change: Of the many challenges we face, is there anything that seems as beyond our control, as forbidding, and, because our understanding of it seems to belong to the world of scientific expertise, as resistant to any power we might have as citizens to deal with it?
Terry Root knows the science and the math of it inside out. She has had a long career on the senior faculty at Stanford’s Woods Institute for the Environment, has been a policy adviser to numerous organizations, governmental and otherwise and was a Lead Author on several Assessment Reports of the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change. Which is no small deal, since for her work on the Fourth Assessment Report she was a co-recipient with Vice President Al Gore of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.
But Terry also has the unique gift of explaining core scientific concepts clearly, of showing how different statistical perspectives can reveal possibilities for dealing with intractable problems, and, in particular, making visible the full and sometimes shocking consequences of what at first sounded like miniscule events. And she has used her high-level knowledge to pin-point at ground level the often simple actions we can take to begin to meet the challenge of climate change. As Terry says, “All we have to do is get off our duffs and do it.
All of which is why we were very excited to have Terry make her presentation to LWVSRQ. What follows is to give you sense of what you missed – and it’s still available on YouTube.
Terry warned us that the first two-thirds of what she had to say would be depressing; but the last third would be – well, uplifting. Well, she kept her word . . .
Already we had seen in this or last year that something was amiss. The hottest temperature ever recorded – 130 degrees – Death Valley, CA. Ice storms that raged over most of the United States and down to the Gulf Coast – a rare if not unique occurrence…a record number of early hurricanes in the Southeast . . .
Current thinking is that this may be the arrival of what was first noticed earlier in thye previous century: that the average global temperature seemed to be slowly rising – between 1850 and 1900, some two degrees F. But this trend has accelerated. In Sarasota, the night-time average low temperature over the past fifty years has increased 7.4 degrees. What does this increase in temperature augur for us? And, as anyone who pays attention to the news knows, glaciers are receding, i.e., melting, and one of the consequences of this will be a rise in water levels. How much of a rise? We already know that depends on whether we continue our present trajectory of the emission of greenhouses gases into our atmosphere. Greenhouse gases are a result of the combustion of fossil fuels – gas and oil being the most familiar but not the only such drivers of the .primary energy source we currently have. Yes, the increase started when the Industrial Revolution began…
The International Panel for Climate Change has mapped out four possible trajectories for the future, one based on a fourth in which all emission of the most prevalent greenhouse gas, CO2, was (magically) ceased.
Back to Sarasota. We know that the sea level at Sarasota has increased 8 inches since 1880. If the status quo were pursued, when we returned in 2150 to that beach, we would find the water now some 31 inches higher then when we had left. We would have to move our beach blankets way, way back. But when our grandchildren or great grandchildren came to the beach in 2100…they wouldn’t find any beach. All the gulf keys would be underwater as would the coastal property of the state. No concert season at Van Wezel. But, by this time it may even be worse. Greenland. Greenland had entered a stage of what had been declared irreversible melt-down in the early part of the 21st century. The final collapse will have yielded a 28 foot sea level rise. The result will be the coastal regions and the bottom half of Florida under water.
This is only a small part of the destruction a rise in temperature would bring. Terry also talked about the impact this would have on animals and plants. Their natural habitats would be destroyed. Everyone has seen pictures of polar bears on ice broken off a glacier and floating out to sea. But it’s not common knowledge that birds are due to take a tremendous hit from these expected changes. The International Panel for Climate Change estimates that a 3.6 F change in global temperature will mean the extinction of one quarter (500,000) of the world’s known species; a 7.2 F change would mean the extinction of one half (1,000,000) of the world’s known species.
This is only a part of the destruction that would ensue; the world is intertwined in ways to which we are blind even though they are in no way hidden. In her discussion Terry puts it both beautifully and accurately: climate change could bring about the unraveling of the web of life . . .
Terry once again mentioned the International Panel for Climate Change. In 2018 they came out with a new report and declared that we needed to our global temperature at no more than 2.7 above the baseline and that to do that we would have to be emitting no more than 45% of the CO2 we had emitted in 2010. This was, and is, a tall order. But they also gave guidelines on how to achieve these goals.
Earlier Terry has shown a graph displaying who were the world’s largest emitters of greenhouse gases. China was number one, followed by the United States. A second graph displayed the who were the largest emitters of greenhouse gases on a per capita basis. The United States was a whopping number one by far. Terry considered this a positive thing. It meant that if we could get our act together, we could make a substantial dent in the problem.
The International Panel for Climate Change provided a guide for getting to the 45% of 2010 emission number. A selection from them
Electricity (28% of emissions):
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Support renewable sources of power: - solar, wind, geothermal, hydro and nuclear.
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Throw out incandescent light bulbs.
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Buy only Energy Star appliances.
Transportation (29% of emissions): low emission vehicles.
Home and Commercial: zero emission buildings
There is yet more – and I would urge you to access our YouTube channel.
One last thought. Terry ends her discussion with a number of actions that must be taken to stop what could be the unimpeded itinerary of climate change. You might note that all of these actions belong to the political realm of individuals organized into group action. It turns out – happily – that it is specifically the power we have as citizens that very well might prove to be what gets us through this dark time. |