What would you like to be remembered for?
What legacy will you leave after perhaps 80 years living on this planet?
There is one thing that we in the UK will each leave behind, on average, after 80 years of present-day-typical living, unless we choose to change. That is a few hundred kilowatts (kW) of ongoing heating per person, that will only be there because of what we did during our lives. That is a lot of ongoing heating of the atmosphere, left behind by each person. This is what our carbon footprint means for future generations.
Perhaps this is a surprise. We normally refer to harder-to-imagine aspects of how humans are affecting the climate, in terms of ‘emissions’ and ‘carbon footprints’. However what is presented here is just the well-established scientific view of how human living is changing the climate, but expressed in a way that is perhaps a little closer to home.
There are ways to address this reality, and we should. However, perhaps we can only see the need to engage with the reality of human impact on the climate if we first understand the sheer scale of the problem. This piece and the associated paper are an attempt to make it easier to own an understanding of what is happening, and hence see the need to act. Both the scale and ways to address the heating are explored in JRI Briefing Paper 54. This post gives a flavour of the approach taken.
The calculation of the hundreds of kilowatts is based around an easily-remembered number1:
each kilogram of carbon dioxide that has stayed in the atmosphere from our activities has a warming effect of 1 watt.
This does not sound a lot until we recall that the average UK carbon footprint is a little over ten thousand kilograms a year (see JRI Briefing Paper 53), and analysis shows that nearly half of those emissions has remained in the atmosphere for recent years. So, the effect of the average UK lifestyle is to add close to 5 kilowatts of continuous heating, cumulatively, every year.
To get a feeling for the effect of this, try thinking about it as follows.
Imagine that on the 31st December we go outside and switch on five of those 1kW heating elements, like we might find in a patio heater. This ‘patio-heating’ will remain running for generations to come, and sit amongst the 5 kW that we switched on last year on the 31st December, and the five we switched on the year before, etc. After 80 years we would have switched on 400 such elements, giving 400 kW of heating. Next time you are outside try to visualise this, as a way of apprehending the reality of the greenhouse effect.
Looking at this prospect in say 1970, it might have been that the atmosphere would somehow adjust to this additional heating, without the temperature changing as much as was, even then, predicted. However, the amount of atmospheric warming we have experienced over recent decades is actually slightly more than we would have predicted based only on the carbon dioxide levels (see IPCC reporting at https://www.ipcc.ch/).
So all of those effects that we sometimes discuss — like: volcanoes, variations in solar power output, greening of the environment, urban heat islands around weather stations etc. — are included in this reality. Similarly the effects of the various other human-emitted greenhouse gases and other effects on the atmosphere, that you may have heard of, have been shown to mostly cancel each other. So focussing on the carbon dioxide increase is relevant, because it represents most of the overall effect.
Please don’t despair! Once we have taken in the reality, we can ‘roll up our sleeves’ and start helping to improve the situation, by responding appropriately, and this is explored in the paper.
In terms of the analogy above we can do all of the following.
We can reduce our greenhouse gas emissions and thereby metaphorically turn on fewer heaters each year.
We can help others to reduce their emissions, and so reduce their metaphorical turning-on of heaters.
We can sponsor projects that remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, either biologically or technologically, thereby metaphorically turning off heaters.
There is a responsibility here to be engaged with the reality of the projects. We need to look at the governance and authenticity, and practical matters like the change in land use associated with any afforestation project. So this needs us to think a little.
A safe approach is to work with an organisation like Climate Stewards, who do a lot of thinking for us. Other options include backing something like a Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration project (see recent JRI Blog piece on FMNR), where those benefiting are typically in the tropical regions and afforestation has positive effects both biophysically and biogeochemically (to explore what this means, see the IPCC Special Report on Climate and Land at https://www.ipcc.ch/srccl/). In such projects the focus is on improving living conditions as well as on reducing carbon emissions. Such projects fall well into the concept of ‘no regrets’ that you will come across in the literature of responses to climate change — these are just good things to be helping with.
It is important to avoid the confusion and engage with what is known about human influence on the climate. I hope we can live together in the knowledge of this physical reality, and work together to make the world just a little better than when we found it, rather than a little worse.
Author: Geoff Fishpool — someone trying to work out what makes sense in our engagement with the environment, not least based on our knowledge of how we are changing it.
1 See JRI Briefing Paper 54 for how this number comes about.