Archive for the ‘greenhouse gases’ Category
Just a few thoughts on climate change and the obstacles…
There are people in the world, in their millions or billions, who know, with as much certainty they can have about anything, that their god or gods exist. Yet, since they don’t all believe in the same gods, they cannot, as a matter of logic, all be correct, and there’s a strong possibility that none of them are. That’s my belief, but is it just a belief?
But my intention here is not to go on about religion, I’m thinking more about knowledge or what people claim as knowledge. For example, and this is my real topic here, some people claim that climate change, or anthropogenic global warming, is a myth, a mistaken belief, or a plot of some sort – a plot developed by certain people who somehow stand to gain by pedalling misinformation. And some people claim this without really believing it, while others presumably believe in it to the point of refusing to examine the science, which they strongly suspect is just indecipherable gobbledygook.
This seems to be the case for many people on ‘the extreme right’, but what exactly is the extreme right?
I tend to consider extremists as people who believe without thinking. Certainly without trying to think carefully or deeply. Another term often used is ideologue. An ideologue is someone who is, in a sense ‘previously convinced’ and ‘thinks’ from that previously convinced perspective, which is generally drawn from strong family and/or cultural influences. I don’t believe however, that they’re hopeless cases, or I don’t want to believe it.
An ideology is often something you will adhere to especially if you are treated well within and feel you’ve benefitted from that family and cultural background. For example, if your parents are both devout Christians and have treated you with kindness and devotion, and you feel strongly that you’ve benefitted from their parenting, you’re likely to feel a strong urge to continue in their tradition and to see the world through that lens.
Climate change ‘skepticism’, however is a non-belief, and it’s often, but not always, connected to a general skepticism of science (I’ve heard tell of Nobel Prize winning scientists who don’t believe in anthropogenic global warming). There are many people who are very ‘turned-off’ by science – not so much clueless as totally uninterested in looking for clues. Science just doesn’t matter to them, again due to background influences. And a lot of such people are in high-level political positions, especially in the USA. Again this is often because they are preoccupied with other things, such as power, wealth or fame – the phenomenon known as ‘getting ahead’, or ‘getting on top’. It would be interesting to ask Donald Trump, or say Nigel Farage, or Australia’s Jacinta Price, to expatiate on their favourite science. Or perhaps not.
These are three people who, I suspect, have never given any thought to finding out about climate change. I mean, doing some very basic research on the subject. And this is largely incomprehensible to people who, when they don’t know much, or enough for their sense of self-pride, about a subject, make some effort at learning more about it – like how the adaptive immune system works, or how we discovered exoplanets, or what’s this thing about birds being dinosaurs. They’ve been encouraged, perhaps even without realising it, to wonder about such things.
One of the problems of our political systems, whether democratic or otherwise, is that we generally find ourselves being led politically, not by people who want to know or learn stuff, but by people who want to control stuff. People who are ambitious for themselves. Examples of such people are too numerous and obvious to mention. And of course the opposite is generally also true – people who want to ‘find things out’ aren’t so much driven by the lure of wealth, power and control.
In the case of climate change, which is much about what we are doing with our wealth, politics and science often clash. It is a fact that our planet is warming faster than at any point in human history, and this is clearly due to greenhouse gas emissions. China is the largest emitter overall, and the USA, second in overall terms, is the largest emitter on a per capita basis, of the world’s highly populated nations (per capita emissions in some Middle Eastern countries, and in Palau, are quite a bit higher). However, China’s total emissions are between twice and three times that of the USA. Its government accepts the facts about global warming and is apparently committed to ‘achieve carbon neutrality by 2060’, though this will be extremely difficult, to put it mildly, given its plans for economic growth. As to the USA, its target will no doubt vary depending on which monarch is on the throne. And please believe me, that isn’t a joke.
We need, of course, to look to the big emitters overall – China, USA, India and Russia, in that order – because we in Australia are minnows in comparison – interestingly, we’re 16th in both overall and per capita emissions. Still, it would be great if we could set an example.
According to the Worldometer website, which I hope is reliable, and which unfortunately only has data to 2022, CO2 emissions are still rising worldwide, though in some major emitting countries, such as China and Russia, they’re reducing slightly, while in other mostly developing countries, such as Indonesia, they’re rising fast.
There are other sources which give more recent data, but the overall picture is complex. Many regions are quickly developing alternatives to fossil fuels to supply their energy needs, but global consensus on the problem, and especially from major emitters, is essential for success – success being measured by keeping global average temperatures to, if possible, 1.5 degrees, or at most 2 degrees, above a baseline (the average between 1861 and 1890). Many have given up on the 1.5 target, and a 2024 poll found that only 12% of US ‘Republicans and Republican leaners’ considered climate change to be a major government priority. This is serious considering that Republicans will probably be in power there for the next 50 years or so, given current trends.
Interesting times….
References
https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-per-capita/
the curbing emissions front 2- problems both environmental and political
Young people, indeed, all people, need to understand that they cannot solve the energy and climate problem without addressing the special interest problem in Washington.
James Hanson, climate scientist
There are wet and dry heat waves. The wet ones are also known as wet bulb events. Dry heat waves are generally driven by large high pressure systems. From Wikipedia,
High-pressure systems are frequently associated with light winds at the surface and subsidence through the lower portion of the troposphere. In general, subsidence will dry out an air mass by adiabatic or compressional heating. Thus, high pressure typically brings clear skies.
The wet bulb events are of most immediate concern. For example, Karachi in Pakistan experienced one in July 2015, with heat stroke killing some 1200 people in a 10-day ‘pressure cooker’. The wet bulb idea refers to the fact that in a humid environment our sweat has less chance of evaporating and cooling us down. It’s defined much more specifically, though – the wet-bulb temperature is ‘the lowest temperature that can be reached under current ambient conditions by the evaporation of water only.’ No, I don’t know what this means either. Apparently there’s such a thing as a wet-bulb thermometer, but that doesn’t help. What is adiabatic cooling? That’s when air is cooled by expansion without any heat exchange with the surrounding environment. Why do I even mention this? I do understand, I think, that when air, or anything, expands, it likely cools, just as when it’s compressed, it heats up. But this surely involves heat exchange. Or the heat ‘dissipates’, is less ‘concentrated’ as it spreads. I don’t know if this is heat exchange or not. I wish I’d never heard of wet bulb events, but I think I can understand that humid heat would be more harmful to humans than dry heat.
Changing the subject, ice is melting at the poles and sea levels are rising, and don’t forget ocean acidification. And the USA, perhaps the biggest national contributor to the problem, which under Trump is happy to exacerbate things (pity about a politico-social system more or less designed for dictators and their mega-wealthy enablers), is likely to do a lot of the irreparable over the next few years. But on sea level rise, many of our largest cities are essentially ports, including the USA’s oil ports, Houston and Galveston. Other threatened ports are in Saudi Arabia, China, South Korea and Russia. Singapore is also in the firing, or drowning line. And of course all of Australia’s major cities are by the sea.
Rising ocean levels are of course long-term (and likely permanent) stuff. In the short-term, that’s to say right this minute, England and western Europe is experiencing a heat wave, and Alaska has recently received a heat advisory for the first time in its history. And we’re not long into summer, and if I’m not mistaken there will be another summer next year, and so forth. Meanwhile the Joke Bogans and their supporters, the one-winged neoliberal ‘think tanks’ with their deep pockets and narrow self-serving concerns, are spruiking denialism and disinformation at every opportunity. Unsurprisingly, much of this disinformation is manufactured and consumed in the USA, as Wikipedia reports:
A 2022 study found that the public in many countries substantially underestimates the degree of scientific consensus that humans are causing climate change. Studies from 2019–2021 found scientific consensus to range from 98.7–100%. Research found that 80–90% of Americans underestimate the prevalence of support for major climate change mitigation policies and climate concern. While 66–80% Americans support these policies, Americans estimate the prevalence to be 37–43%. Researchers have called this misperception a false social reality, a form of pluralistic ignorance.
This, I feel, is due to the noise made by vested interests, which many wrongly believe to be about genuine climate change scepticism rather than business-as-usual cynicism. A major perpetrator of this cynicism here is Sky News Australia, and the oligarchs who fund it, and of course there are plenty of others. Gina Rinehart, Campbell Newman, Colin Boyce and Hugh Morgan are some of the culprits, but there are many others. Some even try to claim that we’ll be saved by ‘the next ice age’. They can’t effectively deny the current record-breaking temperatures so they try the ‘scientific’ line that it’s part of a natural cycle, somewhat like the Milankovich cycles I’ve written about previously, or the solar magnetic cycle, an 11 year cycle in which the magnetic poles of the sun reverse. This cycle does affect the amount of solar radiation we receive, but only slightly. But we know that temperatures are currently rising even when the energy received from the sun is reduced – the greenhouse effect, in effect. Greenhouse gases in the atmosphere have in the deep past been effective in ‘releasing’ the planet from ice-bound states.
The Keeling Curve, which has been measuring CO2 in the atmosphere for decades, has it currently at 429.03 ppm, from 315 ppm at its first measurement in 1958, and the increase is accelerating. It’s currently at the highest level for the last million years or so. We know this from measuring bubbles in Antarctic ice cores. Scientists can also distinguish atmospheric CO2 from the burning of fossil fuels, as it has a different chemical signature from naturally occurring CO2. This is rather amazing, and I’m not sure how they know this, but if it identifies the culprit, that’s all to the good. Maybe I’ll write about this in the future, if the chemistry isn’t too complicated.
So I think that’s enough for now….
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_denial
The Keeling Curve
the curbing emissions front, part the first
Stepping away from global political shenanigans as well as much more horrific stuff re drones and missile strikes, I’m writing now about something I’m not sure I’ve ever written about before, at least in any sustained way – global greenhouse gas emissions and how we’re going re reduction, alternatives and such. A rather huge issue so I suppose I’ll just be scratching the surface.
This post will largely be a self-education. Carbon dioxide (combustion of fossil fuels inter alia), methane (gas and coal production, landfill etc etc), nitrous oxide (agricultural and industrial activities ad nauseum) and synthetic chemicals (hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons et al) are perhaps the biggest problems, but there are plenty of others, most of which, of course, are human beings. Some gases are more potent in terms of their heat-absorbing capacities, for example sulphur hexafluoride (SF6), a molecule of which has 1000 times the capacity to absorb heat than a molecule of CO2. It’s used pervasively in the electrical industry. Water vapour and ozone also trap heat in the atmosphere.
Ozone’s an interesting one. Here’s some of what the USA’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has to say about it:
Changes in ozone and climate are directly linked because ozone absorbs solar radiation and is also a greenhouse gas. Stratospheric ozone depletion leads to surface cooling, while the observed increases in tropospheric ozone and other greenhouse gases lead to surface warming. The cooling from ozone depletion is small compared to the warming from the greenhouse gases responsible for observed global climate change.
So it’s that absorption of solar radiation (by ozone, O3) that reduces the amount of ultraviolet B reaching the Earth’s surface (from the stratosphere), so protecting us against skin cancers, as well as from developing cataracts, apparently. Tropospheric ozone, however, is a small but still significant contributor to global warming, at approximately 0.23%.
So what are the major contributors? According to the USA’s Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, CO2 contributes around 76%, methane CH4, around 16% and nitrous oxide N2O around 6%. There’s also water vapour, which is complicated…
This has little to do with the abundance of such gases in the atmosphere, as, for example, N2O is some 270 times more potent than CO2 in terms of atmospheric warming.
And according to the same organisation, the current top emitters over all are China at around 26% of the total, followed by the USA at 13.4%, the EU at 7.6% and India at 6.5%, with Russia not far behind. In terms of cumulative emissions, though, the USA is ahead with around 25% followed by the EU at 22% and China at around 15%, which tells a fascinating story of industrialisation over the decades and centuries. They also present a graph of decade-by-decade global emissions (CO2 only) going back to the mid 19th century, which shows that these emissions, already very much on the rise, began to rise steeply after WW2, from some 5 million tonnes annually in the 40s and 50s to about 33 million tonnes in the 2020s. And there’s currently no real sign that these emissions are reducing. Australia’s CSIRO has an article from the end of last year the title of which, ‘Global carbon emissions inch upwards in 2024 despite progress on EVs, renewables and deforestation’, says it all.
I’ve noted that there’s a bit of a minor clash about nomenclature – is it climate change or global warming? I’ve tended to favour the latter, as it’s the warming that’s creating the change, right? But then, consider ocean acidification. Scientists have quite recently found that our oceans are becoming more acidic at an alarming rate. This is due to the interaction of CO2 with seawater. Currently, seawater has a pH of around 8 (pH actually means ‘potential of hydrogen’), on a scale that ranges from 0 to 14. The higher the number, the more alkaline, or ‘basic’, the environment, with 7 considered as neutral. Since the industrial revolution, the oceans’ pH has fallen by about 40%. That’s to say, they’re becoming more acidic. It’s estimated that, at current rates, the increase will be some 150% by the end of the century. The implications for our sea creatures are enormous, and of course there will be flow-on effects.
It seems to me that the battle to convince the general public that anthropogenic climate change is a real and serious problem has largely been won, but we have to guard against vested interests and their greenwashing, so there are still plenty of battles to be fought. And carbon emissions are still increasing. The UN has a ‘Net Zero Coalition’ together with a happy optimistic slogan ‘Net Zero: It’s possible’, and its website gives this explanation:
Put simply, net zero means cutting carbon emissions to a small amount of residual emissions that can be absorbed and durably stored by nature and other carbon dioxide removal measures, leaving zero in the atmosphere.
Yes, put simply. The Paris Agreement, reached back in December 2015, called for keeping the global temperature down to no more than 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels. At that time, warming was already 1.2 degrees above those levels, and calculations have it that ’emissions need to be reduced by 45% by 2030 and reach net zero by 2050′. We’re now five years away from 2030 and, of course, emissions are rising. Meanwhile, France (and much of Europe) is experiencing a weather situation ‘de plus en plus étouffant‘ according to Le Parisien. Good for bathing in the cleaned-up Seine, apparently, but swimmable waterways are not a solution, I’m told. The fact is that the speed of climate change on this planet has never been known to be as rapid as it is now – at 0.7 degrees celsius per century for the past couple of centuries.
This was all largely caused by our exploitation of fossil fuels – coal, oil and natural gas – to power the new machine age. They’re called fossil fuels because they’re the product of dead, energy-dense carbonaceous plant matter transformed over millions of years of pressure and heat. This energy source has been recognised and utilised for centuries – the Romans used coal to heat their baths – but the big breakthrough of the 18th and 19th centuries was to turn that chemical energy into mechanical energy, first through burning the coal to boil water, creating steam, the pressure of which can move pistons or turn turbines. This was what created the industrial revolution – more or less. It transformed industry, farming and transportation systems, effectively the whole basis of our ‘industrial world’. We have become blindly reliant on fossil fuels to build and maintain our modern civilisation, including, of course, the ubiquitous plastics in which we contain and preserve so much of our food and drink.
So this all just introductory, the next thing to explore is why we’re nowhere near meeting our emission reduction targets for 2030, 2050 and beyond. I have a feeling that the term ‘neoliberalism’ will be implicated in this exploration, but we’ll see…
References
https://www.cleanairfund.org/news-item/greenhouse-gas-tropospheric-ozone/
Global Emissions
https://www.csiro.au/en/news/all/articles/2024/november/global-carbon-emissions-up-2024
https://www.un.org/en/climatechange/net-zero-coalition