On this journey to understand our impact to our planet and how we can revert it, it’s important to get the basics right first. For most of us, climate science is a topic we’ve learned a lifetime ago, and by now we just don’t remember enough about it or have outdate information, given the advances researchers were able to do in the meanwhile.
When I tried to refresh my knowledge about climate change a few months back, I bumped into a steep learning curve to get up to speed. For starters, there’s not a definitive “Climate Change for Dummies” you can just read and get done with it. There’s an ever growing collection of books, research papers, international agreements, frameworks and articles, with which you can easily get overwhelmed by.
It is also about hard science, which means you’ll be asked to handle concepts from chemistry, physics, data modelling (among others); while keeping in mind the legal, political and financial aspects of topics. Even for people who make a living on complex systems, this ends up being a big deterrent.
Finally, the research community at large has adopted a position of climate pessimism1. This comes from the immense size of the task in front of us vs. what we’ve been able to do so far. For someone just starting, this down beat can lead you to lose motivation, give up and just be blissfully ignorant on the topic.
But not so fast! I believe anyone can become knowledgeable enough to understand what climate change is and what we can do about it. The words you’re reading just now are a practical attempt to do so.
So…what is climate? And why the change?
Climate refers to the average weather characteristics of a certain are. You can think about temperature, precipitation, wind, pressure, amount of sun light and concentration of Starbucks per square meter. When looking at big enough periods (i.e. decades), we can start to establish a “default” state for this system - this balance point is called the climate.
Before we started to mess around with the remote, Earth was in a balance point where the amount of radiation received from the sun and the one reflected back, made our climate reach a sweet spot where life is actually possible (kudos for you, Earth, that’s pretty cool). This scenario is represented on the left side of the figure above.
As human activity started intensifying, it released an increasingly exponential amount of greenhouse gases2, which were previously trapped beneath our planet’s surface and are now floating around on our atmosphere. This in turn makes it harder for Earth to release heat back into space, since it now has to go through a thicker layer of particles.
So the heat ends up just staying around, raising our average temperature, and finally provoking a change in our balanced climate, a.k.a., a climate change.
It’s a similar effect as when you leave your car in the summer sun and it turns a billion degrees, but instead of opening a window you decide to unload a full can of deodorant inside and just sit there taking permanent damage.3
Why is climate change so dangerous? Can’t climate just…adapt?
Earth as an ecosystem has certain mechanisms to keep itself balanced. The increase in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere has, for example, triggered plants to up their CO24 intake, and led to the rise in acidification of oceans, as they also try to absorve higher quantities of CO25. But these methods obviously have limits to their effect, and they also create other problems themselves (coral reef destruction, much?).
And the biggest risk of our current trajectory is that it might lead to a new and different balance point for Earth’s ecosystem, namely one we can’t adapt to. Moving to a new balance point means the mechanisms which are currently slowing down climate change would now work against us when trying to reverse the situation, making it further difficult.
In the picture below, you can see this tipping point dynamic6 portrayed: they act like those little barriers at the bowling alley, which prevent your ball from going three lanes to the left and potentially hitting someone.
Generally, these paradigm changes of climate are associated with big disruptive events, as in the case of the asteroid which is believed to have extinct most dinosaur species.
The quick rise in greenhouse emissions has the potential to fall in this category, and to measure how much room we have until the tipping point, the reference value is the “global warming above pre-industrial levels”, which is most commonly set at 1.5º. This is for example used in the “Paris Agreement”7, as a limit to which countries need to commit to control their emissions.
Alright, I get it now. What’s next?
Great job making it so far! Now you have a general grasp about what causes climate change and its potential impact on our lives, but there’s still a long road ahead and a lot to do. While there’s a lot of ways to make a positive impact, here’s three simple things you can do right now:
Tell someone about what you’ve learned here, especially people you think are also willing to engaged but are not sure how to do so (if you’d like to share this post, I’d much appreciate it!);
Read more about a topic that caught your attention using the links at the bottom of this post. There’s so many dimensions within climate change, it’s a way to figure out what attracts you;
Join a community such as “Work on Climate”, where you can engage with other people going through this journey. It will feel less armageddon’y, I promise.
It’s a wrap!
This is a first post explain the problematic of climate change. In the next few posts, I’ll go a bit more in depth on some of the aspects briefly mentioned here, and I’ll also start describing the solutions being implemented to revert the current situation.
Feel free to use the comments to suggest improvements or other topics you’d like to see written about. And if you haven’t subscribed to Climate Change TL;DR, do so below!
What If We Stopped Pretending?, Jonathan Franzen;
You are probably familiar with carbon dioxide (CO2), but do you know about its hipster friends methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O) and ozone (O3)?;
Please don’t try this yourself, the AXE Body Spray smell will not come out;
Plants help absorb our carbon, but for how much longer?, Sarah Gibbens
The oceans are absorbing more carbon than previously thought, Jamie Shutler and Andy Watson;
Climate tipping points — too risky to bet against, Timothy M. Lenton et al
The Paris Agreement, United Nations