Tag: climate change myths

World Sees ‘Largest Environmental Protest in History’ for Climate Action

The protests, which are being called ‘Fridays for future’, saw adults being led by school children.

New Delhi: With world leaders due to meet in New York and table their plans of action for minimising climate change, a global strike led by the youth is taking place across the world. The protests, which include 5,200 events in 156 countries are led by a range of organisations like 350.org, Fridays for future, Extinction rebellion and Earth Day Network.

The protests began in the east, which rises before the rest of the world. In Australia, over three lakh people took to the streets across cities. This has been described as Australia’s largest mobilisation since the protests in 2003 against the Iraq war.

Pacific island nations like the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu also participated in the strike. A recent leaked UN report has once again driven home the threat that small islands face due to rising sea levels as a result of human-induced climate change. According to the leaked report, by 2050 small islands and low-lying nations are going to suffer due to ‘extreme sea-level events’ every year.

The protests, which are being called ‘Fridays for future’, for the first time included adults being led by school children. The movement took off after Greta Thunberg, the then 15-year-old Swedish girl, went on a strike all by herself every Friday outside the Swedish parliament in August last year.

Also read: ‘We Are Striking to Disrupt the System’: In Conversation with Climate Activist Greta Thunberg

Subsequently, school students across the world followed her lead and began protests which involved skipping school and protesting at a public place in their city or town (it largely remains an urban phenomenon). The Friday protests reached a crescendo in March when an estimated 1.4 million students in 123 countries missed school to protest and demand that governments across the world take stronger measures to curb greenhouse gas emissions.

Photo: The Wire

Since she took the lead last year, Thunberg has become the face and energy behind the movement. “Greta has become almost a synecdoche for the global climate movement: its mascot, its theorist, its revolutionary, and a representative “victim” of generational malice,” the journalist David Wallace-Wells wrote in a recent piece about her in the Intelligencer.

She has spoken at events around the world populated by world leaders, the wealthy and the wise. In December last year, she addressed the UN Climate Conference (COP 24) in Katowice, Poland, urging world leaders present to act and accusing them of ‘stealing their kids’ future’. Subsequently, she spoke at the World Economic Forum at Davos, addressed the European Economic Conference and the US Congress, where she asked the members not to listen to her but to scientists and submitted a copy of the UN SR 15 report as her testimony.

The report was released in October last year and has been referred to as the ‘doomsday’ report. It has warned of dire consequences even if the commitments made by nations under the Paris agreement are met. Under the 2015 agreement, 195 nations agreed to cut emissions in order to restrict global temperature rise ‘well below’ two degree Celsius above pre-industrial levels and ‘pursue efforts’ to limit temperature rise to 1.5 degree Celsius.

The SR 15 report warned that the 2-degree target would be insufficient to avert climate catastrophe. It said that the world is already at one degree of warming and the climate impacts would be exponentially more between a 1.5 degree warmer world as compared to a two-degree warmer world. Several hundred million more people would be vulnerable to ‘climate-related risks and susceptible to poverty’ and ten million more people would face permanent inundation due to the rise in sea-level.

The report also said that the pace at which emissions are required to be cut, in order to avert large scale climate change impacts, need ‘unprecedented changes’. It warned that the window to act in order to keep the world below a temperature rise of 1.5 degree Celsius above pre industrial levels is fast closing. According to the report, the world has until 2030 to cut emissions by 45%, instead of the 20% that the 2 degree pathway requires.

Photo: The Wire

The SR 15 report and the rise of the school students’ movement has coincided to bring forth an unprecedented focus on the climate crisis that the world is heading towards. The movement has gathered strength and has led to some tangible changes.

In February this year, the European Commission committed to spending 25% of its budget on climate change mitigation between 2021 and 2027. Democratic candidature hopefuls for the US Presidential elections of 2020 are debating policies for climate change mitigation. In June, the UK vowed to bring its greenhouse gas emissions to net-zero by 2050.

Today’s protest was organised with a firm eye on the UN Climate Action Summit scheduled to take place next week in New York. The UN secretary-general has called upon world leaders to focus on action. “Don’t bring a speech—bring a plan,” he said earlier this week.

Also read: Climate Change Poses Serious Threats to India’s Food Security

World leaders are expected to take to the podium and improve upon the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), which they had announced after the Paris agreement and which detail each nation’s efforts to curb national emissions.

According to estimates, New York alone would see 1.1 million school students hit the streets. The organisers are upbeat that by the end of Friday, in all parts of the world, the number of protestors would be far greater than the number who had joined in March. The mobilisation is being called by some the ‘largest environmental protest in history’.

The protest was also observed in 70 cities and towns across India including tier 2 and 3 cities like Indore, Tehri, Ludhiana and Meerut apart from the larger metropolitan centres of Bengaluru, Ahmedabad, Mumbai and Delhi.

Photo: The Wire

In Delhi, over a hundred school children aided by their parents and several others gathered outside the Ministry of Urban Affairs and Housing demanding action against emissions emanating from cities in particular. With Delhi being one of the most polluted cities in the world, air pollution was a significant focus for the protestors who demanded that more trees be planted, polluting vehicles be banned and polluting industries be closed.

Also read: Interview | ‘We’re Finally Talking About Solutions on the Scale of the Crisis We Face’: Naomi Klein

The protestors will continue through the week and the protestors will pick up different environmental issues – including felling of trees, interlinking of rivers, use of plastic – every day. The week of protest will culminate on September 27 when the protestors will march to the Prime Minister’s office to urge him to declare a ‘climate emergency’.

“And we will be back on the streets every Friday,” said 17-year-old Geetika Sharma in Central Delhi holding a banner which read, ‘Satyagraha for future generations.’ “If 16-year-old Greta can do it, so can we,” she said.

Five Climate Change Science Misconceptions – Debunked

Denial of climate change has contributed to the lack of progress in reducing green house gas emissions, putting future generations in jeopardy.

The science of climate change is more than 150 years old and it is probably the most tested area of modern science. However the energy industry, political lobbyists and others have spent the last 30 years sowing doubt about the science where none really exists. The latest estimate is that the world’s five largest publicly-owned oil and gas companies spend about $200m each year on lobbying to control, delay or block binding climate-motivated policy.

This organised and orchestrated climate change science denial has contributed to the lack of progress in reducing global green house gas (GHG) emissions – to the point that we are facing a global climate emergency. And when climate change deniers use certain myths – at best fake news and at worse straight lies – to undermine the science of climate change, ordinary people can find it hard to see through the fog. Here are five commonly used myths and the real science that debunks them.

1. Climate change is just part of the natural cycle

The climate of the Earth has always changed, but the study of palaeoclimatology or “past climates” shows us that the changes in the last 150 years – since the start of the industrial revolution – have been exceptional and cannot be natural. Modelling results suggest that future predicted warming could be unprecedented compared to the previous 5m years.

Global temperatures for the last 65m years and possible future global warming depending on the amount of greenhouse gases we emit. Illustration: Burke et al (2018)

The “natural changes” argument is supplemented with the story that the Earth’s climate is just recovering from the cooler temperatures of the Little Ice Age (1300-1850AD) and that temperatures today are really the same as the Medieval Warm Period (900–1300AD). The problem is that both the Little Ice Age and the Medieval Warming period were not global but regional changes in climate affecting north-west Europe, eastern America, Greenland and Iceland.

Also read: The Himalaya Are Becoming Giant Cash Cows

A study using 700 climate records showed that, over the last 2,000 years, the only time the climate all around the World has changed at the same time and in the same direction has been in the last 150 years, when over 98% of the surface of the planet has warmed.

2. Changes are due to sunspots/galactic cosmic rays

Sunspots are storms on the sun’s surface that come with intense magnetic activity and can be accompanied by solar flares. These sunspots do have the power to modify the climate on Earth. But scientists using sensors on satellites have been recording the amount of the sun’s energy hitting Earth since 1978 and there has been no upward trend. So they cannot be the cause of the recent global warming.

A comparison of global surface temperature changes (red line) and the sun’s energy received by the Earth (yellow line) in watts (units of energy) per square metre since 1880. Illustration: NASA, CC BY

Galactic cosmic rays (GCRs) are high-energy radiation that originates outside our solar system and may even be from distant galaxies. It has been suggested that they may help to seed or “make” clouds. So reduced GCRs hitting the Earth would mean fewer clouds, which would reflect less sunlight back into space and so cause Earth to warm.

But there are two problems with this idea. First, the scientific evidence shows that GCRs are not very effective at seeding clouds. And second, over the last 50 years, the amount of GCRs have actually increased, hitting record levels in recent years. If this idea were correct, GCRs should be cooling the Earth, which they aren’t.

3. CO₂ is a small part of the atmosphere – it can’t have a large heating affect

Eunice Newton Foote’s paper, Circumstances Affecting the Heat of the Sun’s Rays, American Journal of Science, 1857.

This is an attempt to play a classic common-sense card but is completely wrong. In 1856, American scientist Eunice Newton Foote conducted an experiment with an air pump, two glass cylinders and four thermometers. It showed that a cylinder containing carbon dioxide and placed in the sun trapped more heat and stayed warmer longer than a cylinder with normal air. Scientists have repeated these experiments in the laboratory and in the atmosphere, demonstrating again and again the greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide.

As for the “common sense” scale argument that a very small part of something can’t have much of an effect on it, it only takes 0.1 grams of cyanide to kill an adult, which is about 0.0001% of your body weight. Compare this with carbon dioxide, which currently makes up 0.04% of the atmosphere and is a strong greenhouse gas. Meanwhile, nitrogen makes up 78% of the atmosphere and yet is highly unreactive.

4. Scientists manipulate all data sets to show a warming trend

This is not true and a simplistic device used to attack the credibility of climate scientists. It would require a conspiracy covering thousands of scientists in more than a 100 countries to reach the scale required to do this.

Scientists do correct and validate data all the time. For example we have to correct historic temperature records as how they were measured has changed. Between 1856 and 1941, most sea temperatures were measured using seawater hoisted on deck in a bucket. Even this was not consistent as there was a shift from wooden to canvas buckets and from sailing ships to steamships, which altered the height of the ship’s deck – and these changes in turn altered the amount of cooling caused by evaporation as the bucket was hoisted onto deck. Since 1941, most measurements have been made at the ship’s engine water intakes, so there’s no cooling from evaporation to account for.

Also read: A Trip to the Top of the World, Where the Climate Crisis Is All Too Clear

We must also take account that many towns and cities have expanded and so that meteorological stations that were in rural areas are now in urban areas which are usually significantly warmer than the surrounding countryside.

If we didn’t make these changes to the original measurements, then Earth’s warming over the last 150 years would have appeared to be even greater than the change that has actually been observed, which is now about 1˚C of global warming.

Reconstruction of global temperatures from 1880 to 2018 by five independent international groups of scientists. Illustration: NASA, CC BY

5. Climate models are unreliable and too sensitive to carbon dioxide

This is incorrect and misunderstands how models work. It is a way of downplaying the seriousness of future climate change. There is a huge range of climate models, from those aimed at specific mechanisms such as the understanding of clouds, to general circulation models (GCMs) that are used to predict the future climate of our planet.

There are over 20 major international centres where teams of some of smartest people in the world have built and run GCMs containing millions of lines of code representing the very latest understanding of the climate system. These models are continually tested against historic and palaeoclimate data as well as individual climate events such as large volcanic eruptions to make sure they reconstruct the climate, which they do extremely well.

Model reconstruction of global temperature since 1970, average of the models in black with model range in grey compared to observational temperature records from NASA, NOAA, HadCRUT, Cowtan and Way, and Berkeley Earth. Photo: Carbon Brief, CC BY

No single model should ever be considered correct as they represent a very complex global climate system. But having so many different models constructed and calibrated independently means that we can have confidence when the models agree.

Also read: India Must Stop Deforesting Its Mountains If It Wants to Fight Floods

Taking the whole range of climate models suggests a doubling of carbon dioxide could warm the planet by 2˚C to 4.5˚C, with an average of 3.1˚C. All the models show a significant amount of warming when extra carbon dioxide is added to the atmosphere. The scale of the predicted warming has remained very similar over the last 30 years despite the huge increase in the complexity of the models, showing it is a robust outcome of the science.

By combining all our scientific knowledge of natural (solar, volcanic, aerosols and ozone) and human-made (greenhouse gases and land-use changes) factors warming and cooling the climate shows that 100% of the warming observed over the last 150 years is due to humans.

Natural and Human influences on global temperatures since 1850. Illustration: Carbon Brief, CC BY

There is no scientific support for the continual denial of climate change. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), set up by the United Nations to openly and transparently summarise the science, provides six clear lines of evidence for climate change. As extreme weather becomes more and more common, people are realising that they do not need scientists to tell them the climate is changing – they are seeing and experiencing it first hand.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.