The year 2023 has officially become the hottest year on record, and it is worth taking a look at how the greenhouse effect and the growth of population and fossil fuel consumption in particular has contributed to where we are today with global warming.
Origins: The study of climate change dates as far back as 1824 when a French scientist named Joseph Fourier proved that the atmosphere kept the earth warmer than it would otherwise be if exposed directly to outer space. This phenomenon we know today as the greenhouse effect was demonstrated in 1856 by Eunice Newton Foote, who showed that the warming impact of the sun was greater for moist or humid air than dry air, and even greater still with air containing carbon dioxide. John Tyndall, an Irish physicist, discovered in 1859 that this warming effect was driven more by carbon dioxide than by humidity. His testing showed that various atmospheric gases, especially carbon dioxide, absorbed infrared radiation meaning they let sunlight in but did not let heat back out. In 1896, Svante Arrhenius, a Swedish chemist, quantified the greenhouse effect and found what could be a cause-effect relationship between low carbon-dioxide atmospheric levels and the ice ages.
Fossil Fuels: With the growth from the industrial revolution, fossil fuel consumption increased significantly from 1900 to 1950, but it increased dramatically in the post World War II era from 1950 to 2017, as did population growth. It wasn’t until 1965 that an appendix to a report prepared by The Presidential Science Advisory Committee, made politicians directly aware of the consequences of how human population growth and growth in the consumption of fossil fuels could impact the earth’s climate. Also during the 1960’s and 1970’s, the seeds of doubt that carbon dioxide was responsible for global warming were planted in official places largely by interest groups backed by the coal and oil industries. Since 1980 however, the impact of the greenhouse effect on global warming has generally been accepted.
More Recent Times: By 1992, the human impact on climate change was universally discernible. At the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change bound the signing nations to “prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.” The 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference, also known as the Paris Agreement, generated the results of twenty years of UN negotiations among members into one universally binding agreement on restricting global warming due primarily to greenhouse gas emissions. To meet the goals of the Paris Agreement by the deadline date of 2030, a revolution of sorts would need to take place. A spectacular boom of renewable energy installations has developed with a great future as the entry costs are plummeting making it cheaper than generating fossil fuel energy. However, this now accounts for only about 7% of the world’s energy. If a five to tenfold increase in this capacity were to be achieved, it could provide the earth its best chance at achieving the Paris Agreements goals. More progress is being made with the proliferation of electric and hybrid-electric automobiles, but there is still a long way to go in a short remaining span of seven years.
Other Commodities and Impacts: Carbon dioxide is not the only thing contributing to the greenhouse effect. Methane, nitrous oxide, and water vapor all trap heat. Burning fossil fuels releases particulate matter into the atmosphere which can absorb heat but also shade slightly the earth’s surface cooling it somewhat. Volcanic eruptions also fill the atmosphere with particulate matter. All things being considered, the largest culprit is still carbon monoxide primarily from the burning and combustion of fossil fuels that has exasperated the atmosphere’s natural ability to manage itself. Global warming is also disrupting the ecology of oceans. Polar ice caps reflect sunlight, but as they decline their absence causes the water to absorb the sunlight and become even warmer. The ocean has balances that push it back to an equilibrium when it moves too far in one direction. Natural forces come into play in achieving these equilibriums, but global warming due to the greenhouse effect is overwhelming these natural forces.
Negative Emissions: This is the term that applies to releasing energy without releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. This could be accomplished by first growing plants that remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and then burning them in power generation plants that store the carbon dioxide that’s created in underground vaults. The stored carbon dioxide would then be released during periods of global cooling to bolster the greenhouse effect. The major drawback with this plan is finding enough land to grow the massive number of plants needed to provide the expected results.
Reforestation: One aspect of global warming that does not get enough attention is one of the simplest methods to combat it, reforestation. Trees hold major amounts of carbon taken out of the atmosphere for many years as the tree grows. The shameful illegal burning of rain forest acreage in Brazil in recent years has caught some people’s attention as it exemplified the government’s lack of concern about the consequences. Controls had been set been in place, but not adequately enforced, and violators took advantage of it. Fortunately, there are reforestation projects underway in the Brazilian rainforests. There are as many as eighty-three currently active reforestation projects worldwide according to tree-nation.com, a website. Many projects are centered in third-world areas such as in South America and Africa, but they also include Western Europe, and the western U.S. states such as California that endure damaging wildfires every year.
Conclusions: Our planet has the capacity to take care of itself with proper management contributions by mankind. Global warming and cooling have occurred before in our history, but never before has the greenhouse effect impacted the health and future of our own earth’s atmosphere as much as it does today.
Source: Briefing Climate Change, The Economist, September 21, 2019.
Wikipedia, Greenhouse Effect.
Tree-nation.com/projects.