“Code Red for Humanity”: The Key Facts on Global Warming
By Catriona MacGregor Glazebrook* and Walker Laughlin.
*Taken in part with permission from her chapter “Goodbye to the Trees” in Secrets of a Celtic Mystic: Sacred Earth Prophecy.
These days, going for a walk outside is all it takes to recognize that the world is heating up. Soils are dry, trees’ leaves are falling earlier than usual, and many beloved wildlife species have vanished.
As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change showed recently, it is abundantly clear that human-induced climate change is already affecting many weather and climate extremes in every region across the globe (IPCC, 2021). However, 30 percent of Americans don’t recognize that the climate is changing (Leiserowitz et al., 2020). And more than 40 percent of Americans don’t believe that humans are causing global warming.
To build a social movement large enough to drastically lower CO2 emissions in the next decade, we need to share the realities of climate change with those still skeptical that global warming is even a problem. This blog lays out some rock-solid proofs that climate change is real and we are doing it. Please share it with friends and family!
For information on climate change and how trees and plants are our greatest allies in stopping it, visit wellkind.org/forestry-program.
The IPCC Report.
According to an August 2021 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), harmful climate trends caused by emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are now irreversible. However, reduction of harm could be lessened by “strong and sustained” reductions in greenhouse gases starting immediately, and in reversing harmful land management trends.
Source: National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)
The IPCC report concluded:
Human influence has warmed the climate at a rate that is unprecedented in at least the last 2,000 years.
Human activities have caused 1.1 degrees C of warming across the globe, and we are likely to meet or exceed 1.5 degrees in 5 years!
Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is at its highest in over two million years.
Methane and nitrous oxide (also responsible for global heating) are higher than they have been in 8,000 years.
Global temperatures over the past 50 years are the highest they have been in over 2,000 years.
Sea levels have risen faster than in the last 3,000 years.
Why the Controversy about Global Warming? Thank Exxonmobil.
For decades, oil company-led propaganda campaigns have blurred the truth about climate change and its causes.
In fact, as early as 1977, Exxonmobil was aware that its business model would lead to devastating climate change. According to investigations by Inside Climate News and Harvard University (2015), the company not only refused to release this troubling information, but did a deep dive into obfuscation of the truth.
Exxonmobil spent thousands of dollars promoting climate change denial and misinformation. This was the same approach used by the tobacco industry to lie about smoking’s health risks.
Carbon Isotopes Filling the Atmosphere Tell Us They Were Created by Industry, Not Nature.
Rising CO2 levels are human-caused. There are three distinct types of carbon isotopes: 14C, 13C, and 12C. The isotope released by burning fossil fuels has risen dramatically since the 1900s; meanwhile, the naturally derived carbon isotope produced by trees has gone down.
Pearson Education, Inc.
The Sun Is Not Hotter, and It’s Not Causing Global Warming.
If global warming were predominantly caused by forces outside of the planet—for example, by a hotter sun, another oil industry-created myth—then the outer layers of Earth’s atmosphere would be heating up as well. However, the National Center for Atmospheric Research shows that this is not the case:
“Climate models predict that more carbon dioxide should cause warming in the troposphere but cooling in the stratosphere. This is because the increased ‘blanketing’ effect in the troposphere holds in more heat, allowing less to reach the stratosphere. This would contrast with the expected effect if global warming were caused by the sun, causing warming both in the troposphere and stratosphere. Instead, satellites and weather balloons confirm a cooling stratosphere and warming troposphere, consistent with increased carbon dioxide” (Trenberth, 2020).
Ice Cores Show the Heating Up of the Planet is Not “Natural.”
Some “climate change deniers” will rely on ice samples taken from the Vostok core at the Earth’s polar region to support their argument that the Earth’s present warming trend is a naturally occurring cycle.
IPCC, 2021.
They refer to an ice-drilling project by Russia, the United States, and France at the Russian Vostok Station in East Antarctica. This yielded the deepest ice core ever recovered, with layers of ice going back 800,000 years (Rejcheck, 2018).
While the drilled ice samples show that the Earth has gone through cycles of warming and cooling trends, they indicate that before the Industrial Revolution, CO2 levels changed less than 0.15 ppm per year. Today’s rate of change is twenty times faster!
Why Continue With Old, Outdated, and Energy-Inefficient Technology When We Can Do Better?
For those who continue to ignore the realities of global warming and its causes, a final but important point is that the way we power our world is outdated. The combustible engine that relies on petroleum lags far behind new, more sustainable, and less expensive technology. In fact, the design for the combustion engine used in most vehicles and engines is over 100 years old!
Gasoline engines often blow more than 80 percent of the energy produced out the tailpipe or lose that energy to the environment around the engine (Evarts, 2014).
So not only are we damaging our atmosphere by loading it up with greenhouse gases and polluting our oceans, air, and waterways with oil spills, but we are also only utilizing 20 percent of the oil we extract to power our world! This is astonishingly wasteful in terms of energy and money!
It’s time to let go of these “dinosaur” technologies and apply the new methods that run far more efficiently and safely. By using newer and better alternatives that already exist to generate energy, we can do better. The reason these proven clean technologies have not been brought to market is largely due to the economic and political stranglehold on the energy sector exerted by heavily subsidized big oil.
If taxpayers insisted that we subsidize and support the further development and distribution of these better alternatives, we would not only be saving our environment and our children's future, we would also be saving money. A lot of money!
For information on climate change and how trees and plants are our greatest allies in stopping it, visit wellkind.org/forestry-program.
Access the IPCC’s full report here.
References
Anthony Leisereowitz et al., “Politics and Global Warming: December 2020 Summary,” Yale University Program on Climate Change and Communication and George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication, report, https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/politics-global-warming-december-2020b.pdf
Neeja Bannerjee, Lisa Song, David Hasemyer, and John H. Cushman Jr., “Exxon: The road not taken,” Inside Climate News, September 16 - December 22, 2015, https://insideclimatenews.org/project/exxon-the-road-not-taken/
Kevin Trenberth, “Global Warming is Happening,” National Center for Atmospheric Research, accessed March 25, 2020, https://www.cgd.ucar.edu/staff/trenbert/trenberth.papers/GLOB_CHANGE/trenberth
Peter Rejcek, “Going Deep: Drilling project to retrieve longest ice core ever from South Pole,” In-Depth Newsletter, National Science Foundation Ice Core Facility, Spring 2015, https://icecores.org/indepth/spring-2015/going-deep-drilling-project-retrieve-longest-ice-core-ever-southpole
Eric C. Evarts, “Fact of the week: Internal combustion cars still waste 70 to 88 percent of energy,” Green Car Reports, August 31, 2018, https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1118534_fact-of-the-week-internal-combustion-cars-still-waste-70-to-88-percent-of-energy