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Fact List

Understanding what is driving the Climate Emergency is challenging. The issues are complex and the facts can be overwhelming. This Climate Check List focuses on common terms and what's driving our environmental crisis. All information is excerpted directly from the following sources: NASA Global Climate Change; NASA global temperature information; World Population Review; The Nature Conservancy/Katherine Hayhoe, Katharine Hayhoe, Chief Scientist; The United Nations; Covering Climate Now; Scientific American; Financial Times; US Energy Information Administration.

Climate Change or
Climate Warming?

Earth's Temperature

Tipping Points

Greenhouse Emitters
Scorecard

Global Reports

What Can Be Done

Global warming refers to the Earth’s most recent period of rising global average temperatures that began in the 1800s following the Industrial Revolution. The term climate change encompasses global warming but also refers to the broader changes that are happening to the planet as a result of global warming, including rising sea levels, melting glaciers, increases in the frequency and/or intensity of extreme weather events like heat waves and heavy precipitation events, and shifts in flower and plant blooming times. Dr. Hayhoe is director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University and Chief Scientist for the Nature Conservancy

 

The earth’s temperature was 0.85 °C 1.53 °F as of January 2022 (NASA Goddard). The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) says average surface temperatures on Earth rose 1.7 degrees Fahrenheit (0.95 degrees Celsius) between 1880 and 2016 and that change is accelerating in recent years. Each of the last five decades has been successively warmer than the decade before. The Earth is now warmer than any time in at least 12,000 years.

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  • What’s  a carbon footprint?  It’s a measure of the total greenhouse gas emissions (primarily carbon dioxide and methane) caused by an individual, community, event, organization, service, product, or nation. A greenhouse gas (GHG) absorbs and emits thermal radiation, creating a “greenhouse effect” that traps heat near the Earth’s surface and ultimately warms the planet.
     

  • What are greenhouse gases? These gases help maintain the Earth’s habitable temperature. Too much of a concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere can disrupt Earth’s carbon cycle and accelerate global warming. Today the main contributor of greenhouse gases is the excessive consumption of fossil fuels. When discussing emissions on a national or global scale, carbon footprint is typically expressed in units of CO2—typically metric tons.

 

  • What are greenhouse gas emissions?  Greenhouse gas emissions that come from human activity have shot higher since large-scale industrialization began in the mid-1800s. Most of these human-caused (anthropogenic) greenhouse gas emissions were carbon dioxide (CO2) from burning fossil fuels. Rising greenhouse gas emission are primarily from carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2 O). Methane, released through farming and in poorly managed gas production, absorbs more heat than carbon dioxide.
     

  • What’s the temperature tipping point?  The internationally agreed “ceiling” is 1.5 degrees C (2.7 degrees F.)  159 nations ratified the Paris Agreement to try to halt Earth’s warming at 2.7 degrees F (1.5 degrees C) above Earth's average temperature before the Industrial Age. According to a 2021 UN report: https://news.un.org/en/story/2021/09/1099992
     

  • Net zero emissions by 2050; major polluting countries and multinational companies have agreed. This means greenhouse gas emissions released into the atmosphere are balanced or offset by an equal amount of emissions that are removed. If achieved, this would bring the goals of the PariS Agreement “within reach” (provided the pledges are fulfilled).
     

  • The US has  committed to a 50% emission reduction by 2030.  READ: Associated Press: 1.5 degrees Celsius: 
     

  • Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) More than 130 countries have now set or are considering a target of reducing emissions to net zero by mid-century. Of the 191 Parties to the Paris Agreement, more than 150 Parties have so far submitted a new or updated national action plan – called Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) – as required by the agreement.

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  • Are we on track? The planned combined NDC emissions reductions that the countries that are part of the Paris Agreement have committed to by 2030 still falls far short of the level of ambition needed to achieve the 1.5 °C goal. (UN) https://eciu.net/netzerotracker

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The United States is among the top emitters in the world: US Greenhouse gas emissions rose 7% in 2021, as high natural gas prices buoyed coal use (according to z Carbon Monitor, an academic group that tracks emissions). The US has committed to a 50% emission reduction by 2030. According to consultancy Rhodium, carbon output would have to fall 5%  every year to achieve the 2030 target. That amounts to cutting between 230 million to 240 million metric tons of carbon dioxide annually, or about how much carbon is released in Florida every year.

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 Top 10 CO2-emitting countries in the world (Total CO2 in Mt) - EU JRC 2020

      1. China — 11680.42

      2. United States — 4535.30

      3. India — 2411.73

      4. Russia — 1674.23

      5. Japan — 1061.77

      6. Iran — 690.24

      7. Germany — 636.88

      8. South Korea — 621.47

      9. Saudi Arabia — 588.81

      10. Indonesia — 568.27
 

   IPCC: Sixth Assessment, published 2021

 

  • Eight years of research from more than 14,000 papers. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) report says Earth is on the doorstep of the much-discussed 1.5°C threshold, and will more likely than not reach this by 2040. The risks of cataclysmic tipping points are a growing threat.

    Key takeaways;

    • The IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) was created by the United Nations Environment Programme to provide policymakers with regular scientific assessments on climate change, tis implications and potential future risks, as well as to put forward adaptation and mitigation options. The assessment reports are used to inform international negotiations to tackle climate change.

    • The report, prepared by 234 scientists from 66 countries, highlights that human influence has warmed the climate at a rate that is unprecedented in at least the last 2,000 years.

    • The 2021 report concludes that human-induced climate change is already affecting many weather and climate extremes in every region across the globe. Scientists are also observing changes across the whole of Earth’s climate system; in the atmosphere, in the oceans, ice floes, and on land. Some - such as continued sea level rise – are already ‘irreversible’ for centuries to millennia, ahead, the report warns.

    • There is still time to limit climate change, IPCC says. Strong and sustained reductions in emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases, could quickly make air quality better, and in 20 to 30 years global temperatures could stabilize.

    • ‘Code red for humanity: The UN Secretary-General António Guterres called the Working Group's report "a code red for humanity. He noted that the internationally-agreed threshold of 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels of global heating was "perilously close.

 

  • The Economics of Biodiversity: The Dasgupta Review  by Sir Partha Dasgupta,      
    emeritus professor of economics at Cambridge university; independent report 
    commissioned by UK Treasury, published Feb. 24, 2021

     

Key takeaways;

  • Biodiversity is declining faster than at any time in human history. “Our demands far exceed nature’s capacity to supply us with the goods and services we all rely on. We would require 1.6 Earths to maintain the world’s current living standards,” says Prof Sir Partha Dasgupta in the review, which was commissioned by the UK Treasury.

  • GDP fails to measure this rapid depletion.  The review calls on governments to replace Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as our main economic measure and embrace "inclusive wealth," which gauges how well societal wellbeing is being protected by combining the accounting value of produced capital, human capital and natural capital. Dasgupta says that “no one would know from national statistics that natural capital is being degraded even as GDP is growing.”​​

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End dependence on fossil fuels focus on amping up the means to increase our use of renewal energy sources such as solar, wind, hydroelectric. Generate energy from clean sources that don’t produce carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases.
     

Thankfully we have better, cleaner, and cheaper ways to get the energy we need moving forward, as noted in Rewiring America, a handbook for winning the climate fight.

  •   Increase generation and reliance on electricity from renewable energy sources (solar,    wind, hydroelectric) instead of fossil fuels,

  •  The International Energy Agency advocates the establishment of policies supporting a faster transition to electric vehicles and incentives to replace gasoline or diesel SUVs more quickly “.  SUVs consume 20% more energy than a mid-size car.

  •  In France, since January 1, 2022, a weight penalty applies to heavy vehicles (over 1.8 tonnes) with SUVs in the viewfinder (it does not apply to electric vehicles)

    • Carbon tax penalties

    • Recover greenhouse gases such as methane from landfills and smokestacks, charging a carbon tax on industries that emit GHGs.

    • Protect biodiversity

    • Deforestation

    • Water

    • Shorelines, oceans

  • Reduce heat-trapping gas emissions from other important sectors, like agriculture, land use change, industrial processes, transportation, and wastewater treatment.

  • Help us use our resources more efficiently, for example by reducing waste from always-on but inactive devices that are estimated to consume US households $19 billion worth of electricity, equal to the output of 50 large power plants, and cutting food waste (one-third of all the food grown world-wide is wasted). A 2019 study estimated that the US could cut its carbon emissions in half through efficiency alone.

  • Suck some of the carbon dioxide we’ve produced back out of the atmosphere and put it into the soil, where it helps restore the land, or turn it into fuel, or stone, or other useful products.

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