Let’s start with a little homework : go here and see the ppm concentration the year you were born .. How different is it from now? As I am writing this we are at 414 ppm : which is a good 60 ppm more from the average (it has a seasonal trend) in the year I was born (I am a 90s kid!).
That’s an average increase of circa 2ppm/year. In the atmosphere. Contributing to the greenhouse effect . And, in case you were wondering , the annual rate of increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide over the past 60 years is about 100 times faster than previous natural increases, such as those that occurred at the end of the last ice age 11,000-17,000 years ago. How do emissions influence the atmospheric budget ? Of course it is not a direct linear effect but it depends on various things - for example on the fate of the co2 after it has been emitted. Is there nature around capable to naturally use it and maybe store it? Also, different types of emissions have different global warming potential , so it’s not all and only about ‘co2’, although these other emissions are expressed as co2equivalents they are not included in the ppm measured but still play a role in the greenhouse effect (think about methane , of which cattle farms are major ‘emitters’) . Since 2005 a ‘global carbon budget’ is calculated yearly - this tries to take all of these factors into account and I recommend you to read the article in detail Now, we know how much ‘sinks’ are important (but also how they shouldn’t be over-relied upon) but also disappearing and why we need restoration of forests and wetlands and nature in general to help us with climate change … What about the state of emissions ? If you read the same news I read (like this one, in italian) you may have seen that co2 emissions associated with energy production at the beginning of 2021 were higher than 2019 (also of 2020 but it’s not surprising since we were all locked in by March ..) . Well. This is the news if you stopped at the main headline. But if you delved a little bit deeper you may read than this is true for some countries like China but in others (Italy , UK, Austria, Germany, USA and even Russia!) - they have decreased ! So it’s not all bad news. Actually , already in the pre pandemic, annual emissions were declining (e.g. in Italy in 2019 they were already less than 1990, given by the electrical sector , with a considerable increase in renewables). But emission calculations are also complicated to make , and there are plenty of uncertainties, for example, global total emissions do not exactly equal the sum of national emissions, largely due to emissions from international shipping and aviation that occur outside of national territories. Also amounts of fuel consumed, carbon and heat contents of fuels and combustion efficiencies are hard to quantify and data are not reliable So , we should be careful with over interpretations. Nonetheless, while we should keep in mind that the changes are not happening anywhere as fast as they should, there are some changes that happening and we should try to keep a positive mindset and find ways to push these positives so they can be the predominant way, maybe disconnecting these …
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