The Times They Aren't a-Changing: More Carbon, More Heat, More Hot Air Expected in 2024

JANUARY 3, 2024
BY JOHN K. WHITE



Mill, West Linn, Oregon. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

A rising global temperature is no joking matter, but one has to wonder when the president of the annual UN conference on climate change is also the head of an oil company. My father liked to joke in his typical impish style, “I’ve seen a lot of changes in my time … and I was against them all.” There are also hundreds of apt lightbulb-changing jokes, such as “How many Irish mothers does it take to screw in a lightbulb? … Ah sure you go out and have a good time, I’ll just stay here in the dark.” Indeed, change is never easy, whether denial about the need, overriding the status quo of a multi-trillion-dollar, carbon-spewing industry that underpins the entire global economy, or challenging the ongoing inanity of oil and gas companies pretending to “transition away” from fossil fuels.

Established by the UN in 1988 to assess the science, impacts, and risk of climate change, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has now written 6 reports, which make for increasingly alarming reading. The latest iteration, the Synthesis Report for the Sixth Assessment (AR6), states at the outset that “Global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase, with unequal historical and ongoing contributions arising from unsustainable energy use, land use and land-use change, lifestyles and patterns of consumption and production across regions, between and within countries, and among individuals.”[1] And yet, there are those who still pretend not to believe in a human contribution, purposely undermine change, or just don’t give a damn.

The French mathematician Joseph Fourier (1768-1830), Anglo-Irish physicist John Tyndall (1820-1893), and Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius (1859-1927) all helped to establish the now well-known, heat-trapping properties of water vapor, carbon dioxide (CO2), and methane (CH4). Fourier noted that the temperature change between night and day (and winter and summer) was minimal because of an insulating atmospheric blanket of “greenhouse gases” (GHGs), a term he coined. If not for our GHG-filled atmosphere, our “pale blue dot” of a planet would be uninhabitably cold. Tyndall noted that varying amounts of GHGs could be responsible for past ice ages – evidence of which was only recently discovered in his time in the scarred glacial landscapes of northern Europe – after setting up his own “artificial sky in a tube” in the basement of London’s Royal Institution. Arrhenius established the first direct link between GHGs and temperature, for which he is mostly remembered today. Thanks in part to Arrhenius’s analysis, it was known by the early 1900s that burning coal would produce enough atmospheric carbon dioxide to raise global temperatures beyond safe limits.

As noted in a 1912 Popular Mechanics article, the atmosphere at the time contained 1.5 trillion tons of CO2, which would double in two centuries at the then industrial emission rates, “unless it is removed by some means in enormous quantities.”[2] Alas, Popular Mechanics couldn’t have anticipated the extraordinary growth of the fossil-fuel industry in the twentieth century as emissions doubled faster (40 years at 1.5 trillion tons/37 billion tons per year). Currently the amount is over 422 parts per million and increasing by about 2 ppm per year[3] (2 ppm is also annually absorbed in the oceans and biomass). In a 1975 Science article “Climactic change: Are we on the brink of a pronounced global warming?” Columbia University geophysicist Wallace Broecker introduced the term “global warming,” noting that man-made carbon dioxide (and now methane) would soon contribute to an exponential rise in global temperatures as indeed is occurring.

More:
https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/01/03/the-times-they-arent-a-changing-more-carbon-more-heat-more-hot-air-expected-in-2024/