This Blog's Focus: Climate Change

A good friend of mine told me about how some of her students, who are all adult scientists, are convinced that humans have not caused global warming. To that, I scoffed, and she responded, “I can’t say whether or not I believe that humans are to blame for climate change because I haven’t looked into it myself.” And not only was she right to avoid forming an opinion before doing her  research, but I realized that I had not educated myself properly, either. Yet after reading Friedman’s summary in Hot, Flat, and Crowded, I have confirmed to be true what I had only had faith in before:

The composition of the earth’s atmosphere "has been relatively unchanged for twenty million years,’ noted Caltech’s Nate Lewis… On the eve of the Industrial Revolution—according to ice core samples that have trapped air bubbles from previous eras and can provide us a snapshot of climate conditions going back thousands of years—the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere stood at roughly 280 parts per million by volume. "And it had been stable around that level for about ten thousand years before that," Lewis added. It started to surge in the 1950s, tracking the broad global surge in energy consuption, led by the Western industrial powers after World War II… In 2007, the CO2 level in the atmosphere stood at 384 parts per million by volume and appeared to be climbing at a rate of 2 parts per million a year.

The general agreement among climate experts is that the earth has already warmed on average by 0.8 degrees Celsius above its level in 1750… "Your body temperature is normally 98.6 degrees Farenheit, and when it goes up just a few degrees to 102 Farenheit, it is a big deal—it tells you something is wrong," says John Holdren, who is professor of environmental policy at Harvard and the former president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. "The same is true with changes in the global average surface temperature."

From our ice core samples, Holdren explained, we know that the difference in global average temperature between an ice age and an interglacial period like we are in now is a mere five to six degrees Celsius… According to the World Meteorological Organization, the ten hottest years since thermometer records became available in 1860 all occurred between 1995 and 2005. 

At the request of the United Nations, the scientific research society Sigma Xi also convened its own international group of climate scientists and produced a report in Februrary 2007, "Confronting Climate Change," in which it noted that even the relatively small rise in global average temperature, 0.8 degrees Celsius, that we have seen so far since 1750 has been "accompanied by significant increases in the incidence of floods, doughts, heat waves, and wildfires." 

Since we can’t stop CO2 emissions cold, if they continue to grow at just the mid-range projections, "the cumulative warming by 2100 will be between 3 and 5 degrees Celsius over preindustrial conditions," says the Sigma Xi report, which could trigger sea level rises, droughts, and floods of a biblical scale.

As you can see, not only is the evidence there to prove that global warming is real and created by humans, but it also unequivocally suggests that we do something about it now. It is the most pressing issue of the era, if not of all human history. 

Because climate change is such an important issue, I’ve decided that this blog and my pledges will be specifically dedicated to reducing my (and hopefully your) carbon emissions. I’ll explain why each pledge is directly related to climate change, which shouldn’t be too difficult to do considering that almost all human activity since the industrial revolution has contributed to this problem—from producing food to cooking to washing up to reading a book at night. This blog, then, will be a holistic approach to reducing carbon emissions by including various ways to contribute to a greener world. As John Muir said, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe." Our actions, as human beings, are not exempt from this web, and taking responsibility for them and finding more sustainable alternatives is the best way to help our environment and ourselves.

I'll post tomorrow on what this coming week's alternative action will be. Once again, I really hope you join me! 

(This blog is inspired by the summer internship I am doing with Oregon Environmental Council. Their website has a plethora of resources for becoming greener, from making non-toxic cleaning products to choosing more sustainable wines: http://www.oeconline.org/)