The Challenge of Our Times

In 2018, I visited the Birmingham Institute of Forest Research (BIFOR) facility in Staffordshire, an hour outside Birmingham.?The scientists here were conducting long term research on the effects of raised concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere on the forest ecosystem.?In one section of the forest, scientists deliberately raised the concentrations of CO2, in what was called a Free Air Carbon Dioxide Enrichment (FACE) experiment and recorded the effects this would have on the forest ecology.?

At the turn of the 20th century, CO2 concentration in the atmosphere was at around 291 ppm, not too far away from 280 ppm before the industrial age. With the dawn of the modern industrial and information age, the rise in concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has been on a steep rising exponential curve. In 1999, the concentration of CO2 reached just under 400 ppm. In 2019, it was just under 420ppm.?The BIFOR research increased the level of CO2 to 550ppm, the level scientists believe we will reach by 2050.??This would mark a doubling of the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere within 150 years.?To put this in perspective, if the entire length of human history was just 24 hours, this doubling would have taken place in less than a minute.?Prof Robert McKenzie, the Director of BIFOR and Professor of Atmospheric Science, said that it was hard to imagine when he was an undergraduate, that within his academic lifetime, he would have to constantly revise the concentration of Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere in his lecture notes, something his predecessors never had to do.???

The conversation brought home to me in very vivid terms the amount of C02 we were pouring into the atmosphere.?To be precise, we are pouring about 40 GT of the stuff into the atmosphere every year.?(50 GT is the larger figure used when considering all other greenhouse gases like methane and nitrous oxide.) But this is still not the really bad news.?First, global carbon emissions have not yet peaked.?The best estimates that we have is that with positive action, we will only reach peak emissions at the end of this decade.?Second, the CO2 we emit today will persist in the atmosphere for a very long time.?While the carbon cycle does move carbon from the atmosphere back to the land and oceans through different processes, NASA estimates that these processes can take anywhere from between 200-1000 years.?A 1000 years of carbon, at the rate we are emitting, is a large stock to have hanging about in the atmosphere.?

The Carbon Challenge is the challenge of our times. And this is what the UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow (dubbed COP 26) which starts in Nov 2021, will be considering. ?The outcome must be some concrete unified action to cut carbon emissions quickly, subscribed to by the majority.???

If we do not act sufficiently, we should expect rising sea levels, a loss of coastal areas, the acidification of the oceans, more cataclysmic climate events like hurricanes and fires, increased cost of food production, and a loss of biodiversity.?This will result in a major change to life as we know it today.

If we do act in a coordinated fashion, we may have a chance to eliminate anthropogenic carbon emissions in a short space of time, and save life as we know it today.?But there will be transitional stresses.?We will have to fundamentally change the way we produce and consume energy, reinvent the way we move goods and services, and devise new ways to live and work.?We will also have to invest in R&D, for we do not have all the solutions to reach a zero carbon emission world today.?Such a world will see winners and losers and while this may be an initial obstacle, we all lose if we do not even make headway.

One of my favorite movies growing up was the Back to the Future series.?I imagine the world today like it is in Back to the Future III : on a train heading towards the bridge that is incomplete.?If we do not hit 88mph by the time we reach the incomplete bridge, the train we are on will careen off the cliff.?But if we do hit 88mph, we cross that completed bridge safely into the future.?I’d like to think that in COP 26, that we will find a way to get the train up to 88mph.??