Solving Environmental Problems through Engineering

The History of Climate Change

The causes of climate change are no longer of any debate worldwide. The burning of fossil fuels is releasing too much carbon dioxide (and other greenhouse gases) into the atmosphere and is raising the average global temperature. Methane production from animal farming is also a major producer of greenhouse gases with the deforestation required to grow livestock contributing to a negative feedback loop. (A negative feedback loop is like a problem compounded by itself: greenhouse gases are on the rise from cattle production, but now you have cut down the trees that help use atmospheric carbon dioxide.)⁷ How did we get to this point? In her book The Story of More, geobiologist and author Hope Jahren, lays out a clear pathway from population growth and increased consumption to climate change. Born in 1969, she chronicles the changes in her own lifetime to illustrate the point. In the past fifty years, farm acreage has increased very little worldwide (only about 10%), but production of grains has almost tripled.⁸ To support that growth is a worldwide tripling of the use of fertilizers, doubling of irrigation, and a tripling in the manufacture of pesticides to keep out the undesirables.⁹ Jahren tells a similar story of meat and sugar production tripling as well since her birth in 1969.¹⁰ These aren’t the only topics she covers. From travel to packaging to food waste, she argues, everything is MORE. More requires more of everything: more fuel to produce and transport products, more refrigeration, more electricity needed, more packaging. These resources are obviously distributed unequally throughout the planet with widely varying standards of living contributing in differing amounts to global warming. Nations with a higher standard of living are often the ones contributing the most to climate change. The United Nations Development Programme Human Development Report 2019 reports that the richest countries contribute the greatest per capita emissions of carbon dioxide which in turn contribute the most to climate change.¹¹

With world population doubling during the same time frame (from 3.5 billion to 7 billion), increased production and consumption comes at a cost: Global Warming (or Global Weirding as some people call it) now referred to more widely as climate change. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the United Nations’ “body for assessing the science related to climate change.” Since 1988, IPCC provides “regular assessments of the scientific basis of climate change, its impacts and future risks, and options for adaptation and mitigation to chart the increase in temperature across the globe and explain its effects.”¹² The current report cycle, called the Sixth Assessment Report is based on the idea that if we find ways to hold the temperature increase to an average of 1.5 degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial levels, we will see consequences that we can predict. Choosing an appropriate course of mitigation or adaptation will be easier with those prediction models. With a 2 degree Celsius increase we will see consequences that will be much harder to control and predict. The scale and severity will simply be too large. Keeping in mind that global average temperatures have already risen about one degree Celsius since 1900, we are talking about increments of half-degrees in Celsius temperature (from 1.5 to 2 degrees) making all the difference in what kind of future our children and grand children will have. But even holding the temperature increases to 1.5 degrees Celsius seems unlikely. The IPCC report states: “By 2030, we need to decrease CO₂ emissions by 45% which would reach net zero emissions at 2050 just to maintain 1.5 degrees C.”¹³