Bad News — Good News. While the simultaneous health and political crises in the U.S. are taking up a lot of our attention, there’s also the third crisis — Climate Change. NOVA has a must-see show that asks the question:
The answer they have is Yes.
(Yes, in the sense that there ARE things we can do, things that are already available or can be achieved in the near future. The question of will we do it is a separate issue.)
NOVA has put together a detailed examination of how bad the problem is and then looks at all the tools we have or are developing to address it. We have to/can do several things. One is to cut carbon emissions. Another is to start pulling carbon out of the atmosphere. A third is to find ways to reduce the heat being absorbed by the planet.
There are a variety of technological and natural tools that can be put to work. The real challenge is this: we have to decide to do it — regardless of the cost — and we have to start doing it now as fast as we can, because the effects of climate change and climate change itself are accelerating, and so is the cost of letting it happen.
The most impressive part of the NOVA episode is the way it turns numbers into visuals. The graphics start at about 5 minutes into the episode, after an introductory summary of what the show is about. If you don’t want to watch the entire show, at least see those.
How much carbon do we put into the atmosphere a year? They start with a mind-boggling graphic. If you covered the National Mall in Washington D.C. with coal from the Lincoln Memorial to the Capitol, and piled it ten times the height of the Washington Monument, you would have piled up roughly one billion tons of coal, or a gigaton.
The equivalent of 10 gigatons of coal are dug out of the ground every year around the planet, and burned, creating 37 gigatons of CO2
It’s not enough to get to zero emissions. We also have to deal with the roughly 1,000 metric gigatons of CO2 we’ve put in the atmosphere since the start of the industrial revolution. Left to itself, it will sit there for centuries.
The program goes on from the overview of just how bad the situation is to all of the various things we can do to work on the problem. There is everything from actively removing carbon from the air and locking it up, cutting emissions, building out renewables, developing carbon neutral strategies, planting trees, even geo-engineering on a planetary scale.
What makes it especially useful is that each category discussed also shows how much it could reduce that 37 gigaton annual carbon emission, and the scale of each needed to do it. While the actual numbers are subject to some qualification, it is hard to overestimate how seeing a visual representation makes a difference in appreciating the scale of what we need to do.
Does it cover everything? No — but with just under an hour it does cover a lot of territory. This won’t convince the deniers, but people who are looking at the unprecedented wild fires, record number of tropical storms, and other severe weather events will find this illuminating.
There’s a 28 second promo here; the whole episode is here. The conclusion is guardedly optimistic. Carbon emissions in developed countries are starting to drop. We need to do more, much more, but we do have a way forward IF we choose. That’s the real challenge.
(And for irony, the episode was funded by the David H. Koch Fund For Science. The Koch family have been and still are major funders of climate denial. )
For more, The Age of Nature looks at how restoring the natural environment can make an impact on climate change. Bhutan is carbon negative — how are they doing it? What else is possible?
Climate Change is not rocket science and it is not complicated:
- The sun shines on the earth 24/7/365; it is constantly heating the planet.
- The temperature of the earth is determined by how much of that heat it can shed back out into space.
- Carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases trap some of that heat.
- Because humans have spent the last few centuries putting more carbon into the air, more heat is getting trapped,.
- There are natural events that can also affect this, but human activity is the most significant one now.
- The planet is getting warmer, changing climate patterns around the globe.
- The warmer the planet gets, the larger and faster the changes become.
- Those changes threaten human civilization and the natural world.
What we need to do, and why:
- We have to stop putting carbon into the atmosphere.
- We have to deal with the carbon we have already put into the atmosphere.
- We already have multiple ways to deal with cutting emissions and removing carbon — there are answers we must start using.
- We have to decide to do it — and start doing it ASAP.
- We are in a race to get ahead of the increasing effects of climate change — and the rate of change keeps going up.
- It will still take decades and longer, and the effects will last for centuries.
- If we don’t do it, no one knows how bad it will get, we haven’t found a limit yet, and the cost of doing nothing keeps going up.
We know what the problem is, we know what we have to do, and we have the tools.
p.s. For one place to start, check out Solutionary Rail.