a bonobo humanity?

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…