Climate Change For Dummies. Elizabeth May
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western Antarctic ice sheet is simply enormous. It contains about 768,000 cubic miles (3.2 million cubic kilometers) of ice, about 10 percent of the world’s total ice. It appears to be weakening because warmer water is eroding its base. For the first time in the 2021 Sixth Assessment Report, IPCC scientists accepted as plausible, but not likely, that the entire sheet could melt. The Greenland ice sheet is also melting — quickly. Both the western Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets are adding to sea level rise.
The melting polar ice is also endangering many species, such as polar bears and penguins, which rely on the ice as a hunting ground. (Chapter 8 offers more information about the ways the polar animals are being affected by global warming.)
Positive Politics: Governments and Global Warming
Governments are often the first institutions that the public looks to for big solutions. Governments represent the people of a region, after all, and are expected to make decisions for the good of the public. So, governments need to be able to respond to global warming effectively. Climate change is a very big problem for which no one has all the answers. Despite this challenge, governments around the world are willing to play their part — and it’s an important one.
Governments need to take the lead. The next sections lay out some of the necessary actions at all levels from your local water authority to the international institutions.
Making a difference from city hall to the nation’s capital
All levels of government, from cities and towns, to states and provinces, to countries, have the ability to affect taxes and laws that can help in the fight against climate change:
Local governments: Can implement and enforce city building codes, improve public transit systems, and implement full garbage, recycling, and composting programs.
Regional governments: Can set fuel efficiency standards, establish taxes on carbon dioxide emissions, and set efficient building codes.
Federal governments: Can lead on the largest of issues, such as subsidizing renewable energy sources, removing subsidies from fossil-fuel energy sources, taxing carbon, and developing national programs for individuals who want to build low-emission housing. Federal governments can also set standards and mandatory targets for GHG reductions for industry, provinces, and states to follow.
The most effective governments work with each other — partnerships between cities, states, and countries exist around the world, supporting one another while they work on the same projects. To read more about what governments can do and are already doing, check out Chapter 10.
Working with a global government
Countries must work together through global agreements to deal with, and conquer, a problem as urgent, complex, and wide-sweeping as climate change. Global agreements create a common level of understanding and allow countries to create collaborative goals, share resources, and work with each other towards global warming solutions. No one country can solve climate change on its own, just like no one country created global warming in the first place.
The core international law around climate change is the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and a series of subsequent agreements, from the 1997 Kyoto Protocol to the current 2015 Paris Agreement. Countries have agreed that globally they will hold to as far below 2 degrees C as possible and preferably to no more than 1.5 degrees. But, collectively, despite marked progress in some nations, particularly within the European Union, the world’s countries aren’t on track to deliver on these goals.
The international discussions are ongoing; government representatives meet on an annual basis for the United Nations Climate Change Conference. These targets we re-affirmed at the last such meeting in Glasgow, Scotland in 2021. We discuss just what goes on at those meetings in Chapter 11.
Helping developing countries
The effects of climate change are taking a particularly heavy toll on the populations of developing countries — countries with little or no industry development and a weak or unstable economy. These countries, which are primarily located in Latin America, Asia, and Africa, have fewer financial resources to recover from events such as flooding, major storm damage, and crop failures. Money that these nations have to spend paying for the effects of global warming is money that they can’t spend building their economies.
Developing countries have little or no major industry development, for the most part (although China has overtaken the United States as the world’s largest polluter), so they don’t add many GHG emissions to the atmosphere. Even China, with its growing industry, lags far behind the emissions of industrialized nations on a per-person basis. Because industrialized countries have been the primary GHG emitters, they have the main responsibility for reducing emissions, and they can also play a role in helping developing countries shift to renewable energy sources and adapt to climate impacts. For more about how developing nations are addressing climate change, see Chapter 12.
Solving the Problem
Everyone can play a part in slowing down global warming, and humanity doesn’t have time to start small. Solving climate change requires a major commitment from everyone — from big business and industry to everyday people. Combined, the following changes can make the necessary difference.
Changing to alternative energies
Fossil fuels (see Chapter 4) are the primary source of the human-produced GHGs causing global warming. Although they’ve fueled more than a century of human progress, it’s time to leave them with the dinosaurs. Fortunately, a wide array of energies is waiting to take the place of oil, coal, and gas.
Geothermal: Jules Verne was wrong; the center of the planet doesn’t contain another world, but it does have plenty of heat. People can use that heat to boil water to produce steam that propels turbines and generates electricity. Even areas without geo-heat sources to boil water can heat homes through geothermal energy (the warmth of the earth).
Hydro: People can harness hydropower, or water power, to turn turbines and create electricity.
Solar: Humanity can use the sun’s warmth in a few ways. Solar cells, like you see on some roofs, can convert sunlight to electricity. People can also heat buildings and water with the sun’s direct heat.
Waste: Garbage is more than just trash. It offers astounding possibilities. People can harness the methane emitted from dumps, burn the byproducts of agriculture as fuel, and even use old frying oil as a type of diesel.
Wind: Remember that pinwheel you had as a kid? Giant versions of those wheels are popping up all over the world as wind turbines, generating clean electricity for homes, businesses, and entire energy grids.
Feeling charged up? Check out Chapter 13 to further explore the renewable-energy possibilities, and Chapter 17 to see how