The economy is up + emissions are down! Guest edition
Katharine Hayhoe
Climate Scientist | Distinguished Professor, Texas Tech | Chief Scientist, The Nature Conservancy | Author, SAVING US
This week, my guest curator is Dr. Joellen Russell . Joellen is a founding member of Science Moms, a group of nonpartisan climate scientists and mothers who are working to give our children the planet they deserve.
Joellen grew up in a fishing village north of the Arctic Circle by the Chukchi Sea. As a child, she grew curious about what happened to the sea ice at the end of each winter: so she decided to study it!
Today, she’s an oceanographer who uses robot floats, supercomputers, and satellites to observe and predict the ocean’s role in climate and the carbon cycle. She is a Distinguished Professor at the University of Arizona, and she spends a lot of time studying the other end of the planet, as a lead scientist for Southern Ocean Carbon and Climate Observations and Modeling (SOCCOM).
Joellen lives in Tucson, Arizona where it is now so hot in the summers that she often has to wake up her children (pictured above) before dawn as that’s the only time of day they can safely play outside. She’s experiencing first-hand how climate change affects the people we most love, and that’s a big part of what powers her fight against climate change.
Take it away, Joellen!
GOOD NEWS
Despite what you might think from listening to political advertising and more than a few media reports, US carbon emissions dropped last year at the same time that the economy grew.
Yes, that’s right! Last year, the US economy grew by 2.5 percent while the total carbon emissions by decreased by 2-3 percent, according to the US Energy Information Administration. US emissions are now down 20 percent from the all-time high in 2007, according to the EIA.
That’s not the only good news. Americans, on their own, are consistently choosing to save money by reducing their own energy costs, whether it is through more efficient lighting, electric cars, better windows, etc. Although per-capita emissions are still at the high end of the global scale, the US has gone from emitting around 20 percent of the global total of CO2 annually in 2000 to less than 12 percent of the global total in 2023.
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NOT-SO-GOOD NEWS
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reported in April that the global emissions of CO2 increased by 1.1 percent in 2023 over 2022, and the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in the atmosphere is now at 419.3 ppm. That’s more than 50 percent higher than it was before the Industrial Revolution (280?ppm).
This means we have a compelling need to MEASURE each country’s carbon emissions, to quantify their impact on global warming, in order to make the changes needed to save our kids’ summers outdoors (and verify our international treaty obligations).
That’s why I spent last summer at the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research in New Zealand on a Fulbright grant, working with my good friend Dr. Sara Mikaloff-Fletcher and her team at CarbonWatch -New Zealand.
CarbonWatch-NZ is the first project to completely quantify an entire country’s carbon budget including the carbon stored in and exchanged between its air, land, vegetation, urban areas, industry and farms. SOCCOM’s data and modeling provides key inputs NZ wouldn’t otherwise have, especially for what’s happening in its ocean areas. When we added the carbon flux over NZ’s ocean area with the carbon data from our SOCCOM floats, their national budget nearly balanced!
Our next step is CarbonWatch-Oceania, which will cover the entire South Pacific, and then we’ll move on to CarbonWatch-Earth which will?allow us to provide quantitative monthly report cards to each country or region on how their emissions are doing. Monitoring and simulating the ocean and its role in the climate is the key to helping humanity bend our carbon curve toward a more sustainable future.
WHAT YOU CAN DO
At Science Moms, our motto is “Swap, Share, and Speak Up”.
Swapping is easy - every time you need to replace or upgrade a polluting product, make sure you by a clean one to replace it. My new mantra is “Just don’t burn it!” If the old product has to burn something (coal, oil, natural gas, even wood) to work, replace it with something you can plug in, whether it is your stove or your car or your snow blower. For now, the US’s electricity is still more fossil-fuel generated than not, but non-carbon energy sources are growing rapidly.
In addition, the classic “reduce, reuse, recycle” is still true. Buy less (no energy is needed if we don’t have to make it), buy used (no energy cost since that was already paid), and give it away when you are done.
Then, be sure to SHARE climate facts, concerns, and solutions (this newsletter has all three!)?with your family and friends. And finally, SPEAK UP and ask leaders at all levels what their plans are to stop big polluters.
We all owe a debt of gratitude to our host, Dr. Katharine Hayhoe, for her enormous role in establishing the Science Moms, whose “Swap, Share, Speak Up” campaign is making a measurable difference at the voting booth and in the marketplace. ?
Engineering and Mathematics Research and Development at Sandia National Laboratories
6 个月Love this and Thank you!
Working with Bailey Military Institute on Drone education in STEM programs, Workforce Development in our underserved communities, future aviation education in Ghana. Engaged in Refugee relief for Sudan.
6 个月It seems to me that we need to quit diluting global emissions statistics by using per capita comparisons. I believe it would be much more appropriate to use aerial quantifications to show impact in cities and regions. As a great number of cities are no longer expanding outward and are instead stacking populations it may be more instructive to show emissions impacts per square kilometer and radially or geographically extending from concentrations and point sources. I suspect aerial representations might provide a more realistic impact on local and regional populations, subsequently then, natural resources.
Self-employed at Paul Young IT Teaching and Learning Solutions
6 个月When do the hard choices start. Like: fewer cars. Less fossil fuel travel which right now means less travel. Adjusting living standards too (1 house not 2, no holiday condo. No interests which are part of the fossil fuel industry like hobby motor cycles, radio controlled remote vehicles. No more petrochemical plastics etc
Ex-computer guy with CLIMATE CHANGE action is my passion now
6 个月Applause indeed. But I also worry about why climate change is so dismissed as an urgent dilemma by most in media and in the public. It's not even mentioned when polls are taken (if it is-it's like 15th in importance). Perhaps we should be including what Global Warming "isn't" as well as what it is. In red Texas, most of the people I talk to say "Our skies are bluer now than they were in the 70s!" and they are correct (see https://www.epa.gov/air-trends/air-quality-national-summary). BUT THAT'S NOT WHAT CLIMATE CHANGE IS ABOUT
R&D Scientist | Engineer | Manager | Entrepreneur
6 个月The saddest thing is perhaps the happiest too. People don't respond to anything that makes them feel bad, responsible for something bad, or just generally is disquieting. Unless it's fear, people do respond to fear. We are going to have more sunny days, does not make people afraid. Further, making people afraid does not motivate them (at least not in a good way). Making people happy motivates them. Here is how saving the planet will make you happy might get a score of 9/10 and lead to some modest action. Here is how not changing what you do will kill the planet a) will get a score of 1/10...what is wrong with YOU, I'm doing fine b) won't lead to any action at all. So what's the goal to be factual and ignored, or to tell a good story that's grounded in facts, although perhaps may not be the entirety of what's going on. Is the role to be chicken little, or is the role to be a kind parent (of planet earth)?