I have always determined that this was not to be a political or preaching site and have strayed as far from such deep and meaningful matters as I possibly could, preferring instead to entertain you all with my dreams. And have they been weird lately! One night I dreamt about a house full of ghosts with a slightly malevolent mother ghost and a daughter ghost who was more freaky for the sheer fact that I had seen her outside of the house and thought she was alive. Seeing her in the house meant she was dead and I was so freaked and the mother was so evil that I had to call for a taxi to come rescue me. Another night I dreamt about a girl wearing the most revoltingly revealing PVC leotard who was murdered by a dodgy serial killer guy. I didn't see the murder, thankfully, but I did see an image of the girl (pre-murder) and then I saw the guy's car and just somehow knew that he'd killed her. I blame the book The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold which I read a few weeks ago for that one. Apparently they're now making that into a film. Is no book safe?
However, the more I read on the subject of climate change the more scared I get and I'm beginning to feel it's irresponsible and lazy of me not to mention it on occasion. Therefore, I will attempt to append to each post an interesting fact/statistic/reading/reason-to-be-entirely-freaked-out about climate change, followed by a little tip on how to do your bit to help prevent the world from utter disaster and probably save money too. Unfortunately it no longer appears to be the domain of long-haired tree-hugging hippy types trying to save the world. We've gone beyond that intersection on our journey to destruction. Now it's up to each and everyone of us to do our bit to limit the damage.
Before I go on I should point out that I am, in fact, the world's biggest hypocrite when it comes to climate change. I really like the idea of living a low-carbon life but I still have not figured out an eco-friendly way to travel between England and Australia. Air travel is perhaps the worst contributor to climate change that individual consumers are responsible for (see Fly and Be Damned by Mark Lynas) and I feel eternally guilty for the amount of it that I do. It doesn't really matter how much I cut down CO
Obviously the idea of everyone boycotting aeroplanes is extreme to say the least and, in this day and age, impractical. Some environmentalists predict that we are approaching the end of capitalism because the world simply cannot continue in this vein; there just aren't enough resources. However, I believe that this view is the best way to ensure that people don't do anything to help the situation. It's scary, it's extreme, it's almost impossible for people my age and younger to imagine and it's like a chore that is so big that you don't know where to start so you just don't bother. I believe we can find ways to live our existing lifestyle more efficiently and environmentally friendly and, even should this not prove to be sustainable over the long-term, it is at least a good place to start.
A pretty picture of Noosa Main Beach to break up the long post and remind you all how beautiful the planet can be and why it's so important that we do what we can to preserve it. I didn't actually start writing this sentence with the intention of sounding like a hippie - it just came out that way.Now for this week's tidbit, and before I go on may I remind you all that I am not a scientist, nor an expert but merely an interested layperson.
A brief and simplistic introduction to climate change as I understand it:
Climate change is caused by a general and global warming of air and sea surface temperatures as a result of increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Once referred to as Global Warming, it is now called climate change for a couple of reasons. Firstly, people living in cooler climates like the idea of warmer weather and so "global warming" does not quite relay the severity of potential consequences. Also, not everywhere will experience warming per se. Climate change may mean colder winters (the UK could suffer significant decreases in temperature in the extreme event of the Gulf Stream slowing down or stopping), wetter weather, more severe storms, rises in sea level leading to loss of land, worsening droughts. The symptoms are many and varied and nearly always nasty.
Some places will be affected more than others and climate change models nearly always focus on global rather than local changes. Global changes may sound small. For example, scientists currently predict a rise in temperature of between 1.4° and 5.8° Celsius for the period 1990-2100. In fact current observations show that the earth is warming at a rate of about 0.17°C per decade which would lead to a temperature slightly higher than 1.4°C (see World Climate Report blog.) . These temperatures may not sound very high but applied globally could mean a significant rise for some localities.
So how does the carbon dioxide get into the atmosphere? Primarily through the burning of fossil fuels, such as coal, oil and gas. The earth has a natural carbon cycle which ensures that carbon released through the decomposition of matter is then taken up again, for example by trees and plants. However fossil fuels, as the name suggests, are part of a much longer carbon cycle which occurs over millions of years and are the result of matter which decomposed millions of years ago. Thus we are releasing them back into the atmosphere faster than the short-term carbon cycle can absorb them. This is why some environmentalists are not convinced that planting forests as carbon "sinks" is an effective solution, as eventually the trees will die and release the carbon back into the atmosphere. The only way we can be sure to stop the release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and therefore stabilise (and eventually reduce) the levels (which are still increasing) is to stop burning fossil fuels. But this leaves us with a big problem to solve: just where do we get our energy from?
Of the fossil fuels we like to burn, coal (which many countries burn for electricity) is the biggest producer of carbon emissions, followed by oil and then gas. Gas in its natural, pre-burned form of methane, however, is twenty times worse as a contributor to global warming than carbon dioxide (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane).
Climate Change Tip for the top - This week's tip for doing your bit:
If you work in an office (or have a PC at home) ALWAYS switch the monitor off before leaving for the day (or when you're not using your PC). Use your PC power saving settings to save power during the day. (Right-click on the desktop and select Properties then go to the Screen Saver tab. There should be a button marked Power...) Setting your PC to shut down the monitor, stand-by or hibernate after certain periods of inactivity will save energy. If you won't be using your PC for more than 8 hours then either shut it down or hibernate it. If you do this with your PC at home it should save you money too; running a PC costs 3.5c per hour (see reference 6 below) which would cost $306 per year if you left your PC on permanently. If you use it for three hours a day but switched it off at all other times you would save $268. I don't have similar figures for the UK but apparently leaving a PC monitor on all night wastes enough electricity to microwave six dinners (http://www.admin.ox.ac.uk/estates/environment/energyandw.shtml) and according to Scott Richards from power supply manufacturer Antec (see http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/click_online/4929594.stm), "If a million PC users switched to a more efficient power supply, it would save almost the equivalent of 250 thousand litres of gasoline a day."
For more information see:
- http://www.pcdoctor-guide.com/wordpress/?p=204
- http://michaelbluejay.com/electricity/computers.html
- http://www.earthcarecanada.com/FAQs/Energy_related_FAQ.asp
For help with the difference between stand-by and hibernate see:
- http://www.windowsnetworking.com/kbase/WindowsTips/Windows2000/UserTips/
Hybernation/HybernationvsStandbyModeinWindows2000.html - http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=56728
- http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/setup/learnmore/russel_02march25.mspx
Resources and Further Reading
This is all just information I have gathered into my head over the last couple of years so I can't pinpoint where all of it comes from. However, here is a list of resources that I have read which will provide further information:
- The Weather Makers by Tim Flannery
- High Tide by Mark Lynas (Mark's final chapter inspired me to write this post.)
- A Big Fix: Radical Solutions for Australia's Environmental Crisis by Ian Lowe
- Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic by John De Graaf, David Wann and Thomas H. Naylor (I thoroughly recommend this book by the way.)
- Affluenza by Clive Hamilton
- Eco-Wise and Wealthy by Joanna Tovia
- www.realclimate.org
- www.marklynas.org
- www.greenpeace.org.au/climate/
- www.greenpeace.org.uk/gp_pollution/climate_change.cfm
- The Modern Scholar: Global Warming, Global Threat, a series of audio lectures by Professor Michael B. McElroy. This was what first stimulated my interest.
(BANG! Ooops sorry. Just fell off my soap box.)
