Greenhouse Gases Quotes

The four highest-impact things an individual can do to tackle climate change are eat a plant-based diet, avoid air travel, live car-free, and have fewer children. Of those four actions, only plant-based eating immediately addresses methane and nitrous oxide, the most urgently important greenhouse gases.

There are two numbers you need to know about climate change. The first is 51 billion. The other is zero. Fifty-one billion is how many tons of greenhouse gases the world typically adds to the atmosphere every year.

The enlightened response to climate change is to figure out how to get the most energy with the least emission of greenhouse gases.

Textile production is second only to the oil industry for pollution. It adds more greenhouse gases to our atmosphere than all international flights and maritime shipping combined.

We can continue pushing our earth out of balance, with greenhouse gases accelerating each year, or we can regain balance by acknowledging that if we harm one species, one forest, one lake, this ripples through the entire complex web. Mistreatment of one species is mistreatment of all. The rest of the planet has been waiting patiently for us to figure that out. Making this transformation requires that humans recommect with nature -- the forests, the prairie, the oceans -- instead of treating everything and everyone as objects for exploitation.

The enlightened response to climate change is to figure out how to get the most energy with the least emission of greenhouse gases. There is, to be sure, a tragic view of modernity in which this is impossible: industrial society, powered by flaming carbon, contains the fuel of its own destruction. But the tragic view is incorrect. Ausubel notes that the modern world has been progressively decarbonizing.

Nonetheless, a movement within the American political right, heavily underwritten by fossil fuel interests, has prosecuted a fanatical and mendacious campaign to deny that greenhouse gases are warming the planet.47 In doing so they have advanced the conspiracy theory that the scientific community is fatally infected with political correctness and ideologically committed to a government takeover of the economy.

times with follow-up questions. Eventually it sank in. The world needs to provide more energy so the poorest can thrive, but we need to provide that energy without releasing any more greenhouse gases. Now the problem seemed even harder. It wasn’t enough to deliver cheap, reliable energy for the poor. It also had to be clean.

In Bangladesh alone, tens of millions are expected to have to flee from low-lying plains in coming years because of sea level rise and more severe weather, creating a migrant crisis that will make today's pale in significance. With considerable justice, Bangladesh's leading climate scientist says that "These migrants should have the right to move to the countries from which all these greenhouse gases are coming. Millions should be able to go to the United States." And to the other rich countries that have grown wealthy while bringing about a new geological era, the Anthropocene, marked by radical human transformation of the environment.

As far as extinction is concerned, the absolute climate is not to blame, nor is the direction of change. It is the rapidity of change that is important. Communities of organisms need time to adapt – if too much change is thrust upon them at once, devastation and loss is the common response. This is true of the end-Cretaceous, when the impact of an extraterrestrial rock caused near-immediate global winter, and of the end-Permian, when skyrocketing greenhouse gases from unprecedented volcanic eruptions sparked global warming.

This is one of the ironies of being told that we live in a time of unprecedented connection. It is true that we can and do communicate across vast geographies with an ease and speed that were unimaginable only a generation ago. But in the midst of this global web of chatter, we somehow manage to be less connected to the people with whom we are most intimately enmeshed... Ours is an economy of ghosts, of deliberate blindness. Air is the ultimate unseen, and the greenhouse gases that warm it are our most elusive ghosts of all.

the fashion industry has an enormous carbon footprint. Textile production is second only to the oil industry for pollution. It adds more greenhouse gases to our atmosphere than all international flights and maritime shipping combined. Estimates suggest that the fashion industry is responsible for a whopping 10 percent of global CO2 emissions,26 and as we increase our consumption of fast fashion, the related emissions are set to grow rapidly.

With these thoughts came another: Was that unity of effort, that sense of common purpose, possible only when the goal involved killing a terrorist? The question nagged at me. For all the pride and satisfaction I took in the success of our mission in Abbottabad, the truth was that I hadn't felt the same exuberance as I had on the night the health care bill passed. I found myself imagining what America might look like if we could rally the country so that our government brought the same level of expertise and determination to educating our children or housing the homeless as it had to getting bin Laden; if we could apply the same persistence and resources to reducing poverty or curbing greenhouse gases or making sure every family had access to decent day care. I knew that even my own staff would dismiss these notions as utopian. And the fact that this was the case, the fact that we could no longer imagine uniting the country around anything other than thwarting attacks and defeating external enemies, I took as a measure of how far my presidency still fell short of what I wanted it to be - and how much work I had left to do.

The climate crisis is both the easiest and the hardest issue we have ever faced. The easiest because we know what we must do. We must stop the emissions of greenhouse gases. The hardest because our current economics are still totally dependent on burning fossil fuels, and thereby destroying ecosystems in order to create everlasting economic growth.

omnivores contribute seven times the volume of greenhouse gases that vegans do.

We are already engineering the Earth’s operating system by dumping billions of tons of greenhouse gases into it every year. We’re just doing it badly. Why not get good at it?

Livestock produce more greenhouse gases than global airplane and car emissions combined, and 65 percent of these gases come from cows.

That's right-the striking thing about greenhouse gases is the diversity of sources that emit them. A herd of cattle belching can be worse than highway full of hummers.

If cattle were their own nation, they would be the world’s third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases.

Tip: Whenever you see some number of tons of greenhouse gases, convert it to a percentage of 51 billion, which is the world’s current yearly total emissions (in carbon dioxide equivalents).

The Sun heats the ground, and the ground heats the air. Visible light hits Earth and heats it. Earth reradiates that same energy as infrared, and it’s the infrared that gets trapped by the greenhouse gases.

For all the attention lavished on other sources of greenhouse gases such as aviation or deforestation, the production of cement generates more CO2 than those two sectors combined. Cement production accounts for a staggering 7–8 per cent of all carbon emissions.

If the bottom of your pool is above sea level, connecting it to the ocean won’t work; water would just flow downhill to the sea. But what if you could bring the sea up to you? Well, you’re in luck; it’s happening whether you want it to or not. Thanks to the trapped heat caused by greenhouse gases, the seas have been rising for many decades now. Sea-level-rise is caused by a combination of melting ice and thermal expansion of the water. If you want to fill your pool, you could try accelerating sea-level rise. Sure, it would worsen the immeasurable ecological and human toll of climate change, but on the other hand, you could have a sweet pool party.

Tony Blair, who held the presidency of the G8 in 2005, spent the months leading up to that year’s summit trying to convince Bush that, in his words, “the time to act is now.” It’s plain, Blair said in an address devoted to climate change, that “the emission of greenhouse gases … is causing global warming at a rate that began as significant, has become alarming, and is simply unsustainable in the long-term. And by ‘long-term’I do not mean centuries ahead. I mean within the lifetime of my children certainly; and possibly within my own. And by ‘unsustainable,’ I do not mean a phenomenon causing problems of adjustment. I mean a challenge so far-reaching in its impact and irreversible in its destructive power, that it alters radically human existence.

I found myself imagining what America might look like if we could rally the country so that our government brought the same level of expertise and determination to educating our children or housing the homeless as it had to getting bin Laden; if we could apply the same persistence and resources to reducing poverty or curbing greenhouse gases or making sure every family had access to decent day care. I knew that even my own staff would dismiss these notions as utopian. And the fact that this was the case, the fact that we could no longer imagine uniting the country around anything other than thwarting attacks and defeating external enemies, I took as a measure of how far my presidency still fell short of what I wanted it to be - and how much work I had left to do.

They emit too many greenhouse gases. Well-managed cattle can be a net carbon sink, but even in a system where there are slight emissions, the nutritional gains and the added environmental benefits of cattle (increased biodiversity, better water-holding capacity, breaking down nonnutritive foods and converting them into a nutrient-rich source of protein and fats) far outweigh the 2 percent global emissions, especially compared to other less nutritious yet higher-emission-producing foods like rice.

Eating dinner with conservation biologists was like walking through a minefield of ethical decisions: grasslands have been overgrazed by steer raised for beef, and all cattle emit greenhouse gases though enteric fermentation; the poop from industrially raised chickens poisons the Chesapeake; the Amazon has been slashed and burned for soy--and don't even mention seafood. To this bunch of herpetologists, the sin of ordering shrimp lay in the bycatch--young fish, and especially sea turtles, caught in the nets and discarded, dead or dying.

Only in the United States does our conservative party, with very few exceptions, flat-out deny that there’s a problem. The opposition of the American conservative political movement is the primary reason the United States has not taken stronger legislative action to reduce greenhouse gases; our inaction is one of the main reasons the world has continued to warm. In short, the loss of human and animal life and habitats that we are already experiencing is in no small part due to the American conservative political faction. And that political faction is almost entirely white.

We travel together, passengers on a little space ship, dependent on its vulnerable reserves of air and soil; all committed for our safety to its security and peace; preserved from annihilation only by the care, the work, and, I will say, the love we give our fragile craft. We cannot maintain it half fortunate, half miserable, half confident, half despairing, half slave—to the ancient enemies of man—half free in a liberation of resources undreamed of until this day. No craft, no crew can travel safely with such vast contradictions. On their resolution depends the survival of us all.

According to the UN, the livestock sector is responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, around 40 percent more than the entire transport sector — cars, trucks, planes, trains, and ships — combined. Animal agriculture is responsible for 37 percent of anthropogenic methane, which offers twenty-three times the global warming potential (GWP) of CO2, as well as 65 percent of anthropogenic nitrous oxide, which provides a staggering 296 times the GWP of CO2. The most current data even quantifies the role of diet: omnivores contribute seven times the volume of greenhouse gases that vegans do.

Right now, I see the country of my birth moving backward. It has dumped the Paris Agreement, it’s close to dismantling the Environmental Protection Agency, and the United States Department of Agriculture is in very bad shape. The United States Department of Energy, which funded my lab for more than a decade to study greenhouse gases, has shut down most of its work on climate change, and NASA is under pressure to do the same. I left the United States in 2016 and moved to Norway because I believe that my laboratory will have more support here and because I am worried about the future of science in America.

Adding carbon dioxide, or any other greenhouse gas, to the atmosphere by, say, burning fossil fuels or leveling forests is, in the language of climate science, an anthropogenic forcing. Since preindustrial times, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere has risen by roughly a third, from 280 to 378 parts per million. During the same period, the concentration of methane has more than doubled, from .78 to 1.76 parts per million. Scientists measure forcings in terms of watts per square meter, or w/m2, by which they mean that a certain number of watts have been added (or, in the case of a negative forcing, like aerosols, subtracted) for every single square meter of the earth’s surface. The size of the greenhouse forcing is estimated, at this point, to be 2.5 w/m2. A miniature Christmas light gives off about four tenths of a watt of energy, mostly in the form of heat, so that, in effect (as Sophie supposedly explained to Connor), we have covered the earth with tiny bulbs, six for every square meter. These bulbs are burning twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, year in and year out. If greenhouse gases were held constant at today’s levels, it is estimated that it would take several decades for the full impact of the forcing that is already in place to be felt. This is because raising the earth’s temperature involves not only warming the air and the surface of the land but also melting sea ice, liquefying glaciers, and, most significant, heating the oceans, all processes that require tremendous amounts of energy. (Imagine trying to thaw a gallon of ice cream or warm a pot of water using an Easy-Bake oven.) The delay that is built into the system is, in a certain sense, fortunate. It enables us, with the help of climate models, to foresee what is coming and therefore to prepare for it. But in another sense it is clearly disastrous, because it allows us to keep adding CO2 to the atmosphere while fobbing the impacts off on our children and grandchildren.

for the next century could raise the world’s temperature some 4°C (7.2°F), bringing serious coastal flooding and other damage.” The Conservation Foundation urged renewed funding for Keeling’s CO 2 project and pressed the National Academy of Sciences to pay attention to the subject. From then on, awareness of climate change ascended right along with the Keeling Curve. In 1971 Barry Commoner’s environmentalist bestseller, The Closing Circle, gave an early public warning about greenhouse gases. In 1978 a young congressman from Tennessee, Albert Gore, held hearings on global warming, starring his Harvard teacher Roger Revelle, who had sponsored the Keeling CO 2 research

Organic farming is environmentally friendlier to every acre of land. But it requires _more_ acres. The trade-off is a harsh one. Would we rather have pesticides on farmland and nitrogen runoffs from them? Or would we rather chop down more forest? How much more forest would we have to chop down? If we wanted to reduce pesticide use and nitrogen runoff by turning all of the world’s farmland to organic farming, we’d need about 50 percent more farmland than we have today. Nobel Prize winner Norman Borlaug, whose work helped triple crop yields over the last fifty years and arguably saved billions from starvation, estimates that the world would need an _additional_ 5 to 6 billion head of cattle to produce enough manure to fertilize that farmland. There are only an estimated 1.3 billion cattle on the planet today. Combined, we’d need to chop down roughly half of the world’s remaining forest to grow crops and to graze cattle that produce enough manure to fertilize those crops. Clearing that much land would produce around 500 billion tons of CO2, or almost as much as the total cumulative CO2 emissions of the world thus far. And the cattle needed to fertilize that land would produce far _more_ greenhouse gases, in the form of methane, than all of agriculture does today, possibly enough to equal all human greenhouse gases emitted from all sources today. That’s not a viable path.

Like all demonstrations of progress, reports on the improving state of the environment are often met with a combination of anger and illogic. The fact that many measures of environmental quality are improving does not mean that everything is OK, that the environment got better by itself, or that we can just sit back and relax. For the cleaner environment we enjoy today we must thank the arguments, activism, legislation, regulations, treaties, and technological ingenuity of the people who sought to improve it in the past.35 We’ll need more of each to sustain the progress we’ve made, prevent reversals (particularly under the Trump presidency), and extend it to the wicked problems that still face us, such as the health of the oceans and, as we shall see, atmospheric greenhouse gases.

Greenhouse gases, like carbon dioxide, absorb infrared energy and help warm the planet. So they're absolutely crucial. The problem is that their concentration in the atmosphere needs to be regulated as the sun slowly brightens. Otherwise, the Earth would not be able to stabilize its surface temperature, which would be disastrous. Plate tectonics cycles fragments of the Earth's crust -- including limestone, which is made up of calcium, carbon dioxide, and oxygen atoms -- down into the mantle. There, the planet's internal heat releases the carbon dioxide, which is then continually vented to the atmosphere through volcanoes. It's quite an elaborate process, but the end result is a kind of thermostat that keeps the greenhouse gases in balance and our surface temperature under control. --Guillermo Gonzalez, Ph.D. (astronomer & physicist)

When you look carefully at the infrared spectrum of the Earth, you discover the minor constituents of the air. In addition to water vapor, there’s carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), and other gases that absorb the heat that the Earth tries to radiate away to space at night. These gases warm the planet. Without them, the Earth would everywhere be below the freezing point of water. You’ve discovered this world’s greenhouse effect.

they had all worked together seamlessly and selflessly, without regard to credit or turf or political preferences, to achieve a shared goal. With these thoughts came another: Was that unity of effort, that sense of common purpose, possible only when the goal involved killing a terrorist? The question nagged at me. For all the pride and satisfaction I took in the success of our mission in Abbottabad, the truth was that I hadn’t felt the same exuberance as I had on the night the healthcare bill passed. I found myself imagining what America might look like if we could rally the country so that our government brought the same level of expertise and determination to educating our children or housing the homeless as it had to getting bin Laden; if we could apply the same persistence and resources to reducing poverty or curbing greenhouse gases or making sure every family had access to decent day care.

•  The four highest-impact things an individual can do to tackle climate change are eat a plant-based diet, avoid air travel, live car-free, and have fewer children. •  Of those four actions, only plant-based eating immediately addresses methane and nitrous oxide, the most urgently important greenhouse gases. •  Most people are not in the process of deciding whether to have a baby. •  Eighty-five percent of Americans drive to work. Few drivers can simply decide to stop using their cars. •  For Americans, 29 percent of air travel in 2017 was for business purposes, and 21 percent was for “personal non-leisure purposes.” Businesses must rely more on remote communication, “personal non-leisure” flights must be reduced, and personal leisure flights can and must be cut, but the fact remains that a sizable portion of air travel is unavoidable. •  Everyone will eat a meal relatively soon and can immediately participate in the reversal of climate change.

The largest sources of CO2 from animal agriculture come not from the animals themselves (through respiration and waste), but from the inputs and land-use changes necessary to maintain and feed them, including: burning fossil fuels to produce fertilisers used in feed production; maintaining intensive animal production facilities; growing the associated animal feed; transporting the animal feed; and processing and transporting the animal products. Furthermore, clearing land to graze livestock and grow feed is the largest single cause of deforestation and among the major causes of land degradation and desertification.

So what then is “climate change”? As the WMO defines it, “climate change refers to a statistically significant variation in either the mean state of the climate or in its variability, persisting for an extended period (typically decades or longer).” The important thing to keep in mind here is that the climate changes because it is forced to change. And it is forced to change either by natural forces or by forces introduced by mankind. In other words, the climate varies naturally because of its own complex internal dynamics, but it changes because something forces it to change. The most important natural forces inducing climate change are changes in the earth’s orbit—which change the intensity of the sun’s radiation hitting different parts of the earth, which changes the thermal energy balance of the lower atmosphere, which can change the climate. Climate change, scientists know, can also be triggered by large volcanic eruptions, which can release so many dust particles into the air that they act as an umbrella and shield the earth from some of the sun’s radiation, leading to a cooling period. The climate can be forced to change by natural, massive releases of greenhouses gases from beneath the earth’s surface—gases, like methane, that absorb much more heat than carbon dioxide and lead to a sudden warming period. What is new about this moment in the earth’s history is that the force driving climate change is not a change in the earth’s orbit, not a volcanic eruption, not a sudden natural release of greenhouse gases—but the burning of fossil fuels, the cultivation of rice and livestock, and the burning and clearing of forests by mankind, which together are pumping carbon dioxide, methane, and other heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere a hundred times faster than nature normally does.

One response to the prospect of climate change is to deny that it is occurring or that human activity is the cause. It's completely appropriate of course to challenge the hypothesis of anthropogenic climate change on scientific grounds, particularly given the extreme measures it calls for if it is true. The great virtue of science is that a true hypothesis will in the long run withstand attempts to falsify it. Anthropogenic climate change is the most vigorously challenged scientific hypothesis in history. By now, all the major challenges such as that global temperatures have stopped rising, that they only seem to be rising because they were only measured in urban heat islands, or that they really are rising, but only because the sun is getting hotter, have been refuted, and even many skeptics have been convinced. A recent survey found that exactly 4 out of 69,406 authors of peer reviewed articles in the scientific literature rejected the hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming. And that the peer reviewed literature contains no convincing evidence against the hypothesis. Nonetheless, a movement within the American political right, heavily underwritten by fossil fuel interests, has prosecuted a fanatical and mendacious campaign to deny that greenhouse gases are harming the planet. In doing so, they have advanced the conspiracy theory that the scientific community is fatally infected with political correctness and ideologically committed to a government takeover of the economy. As someone who considers himself something of a watchdog for politically correct dogma in academia, I can state that this is nonsense. Physical scientists have no such agenda and the evidence speaks for itself. And it's precisely because of challenges like this that scholars in all fields have a duty to secure the credibility of the academy by not enforcing political orthodoxies.

This terrifying experiment has already been set in motion. Unlike nuclear war—which is a future potential—climate change is a present reality. There is a scientific consensus that human activities, in particular the emission of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, are causing the earth’s climate to change at a frightening rate.7 Nobody knows exactly how much carbon dioxide we can continue to pump into the atmosphere without triggering an irreversible cataclysm. But our best scientific estimates indicate that unless we dramatically cut the emission of greenhouse gases in the next twenty years, average global temperatures will increase by more than 3.6ºF, resulting in expanding deserts, disappearing ice caps, rising oceans and more frequent extreme weather events such as hurricanes and typhoons.8 These changes in turn will disrupt agricultural production, inundate cities, make much of the world uninhabitable, and send hundreds of millions of refugees in search of new homes.9 Moreover, we are rapidly approaching a number of tipping points, beyond which even a dramatic drop in greenhouse gas emissions will not be enough to reverse the trend and avoid a worldwide tragedy. For example, as global warming melts the polar ice sheets, less sunlight is reflected back from planet Earth to outer space. This means that the planet absorbs more heat, temperatures rise even higher, and the ice melts even faster. Once this feedback loop crosses a critical threshold it will gather an unstoppable momentum, and all the ice in the polar regions will melt even if humans stop burning coal, oil, and gas. Therefore it is not enough that we recognize the danger we face. It is critical that we actually do something about it now. Unfortunately, as of 2018, instead of a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, the global emission rate is still increasing. Humanity has very little time left to wean itself from fossil fuels. We need to enter rehab today. Not next year or next month, but today. “Hello, I am Homo sapiens, and I am a fossil-fuel addict.

The principal energy sources of our present industrial civilization are the so-called fossil fuels. We burn wood and oil, coal and natural gas, and, in the process, release waste gases, principally CO2, into the air. Consequently, the carbon dioxide content of the Earth’s atmosphere is increasing dramatically. The possibility of a runaway greenhouse effect suggests that we have to be careful: Even a one- or two-degree rise in the global temperature can have catastrophic consequences. In the burning of coal and oil and gasoline, we are also putting sulfuric acid into the atmosphere. Like Venus, our stratosphere even now has a substantial mist of tiny sulfuric acid droplets. Our major cities are polluted with noxious molecules. We do not understand the long-term effects of our course of action. But we have also been perturbing the climate in the opposite sense. For hundreds of thousands of years human beings have been burning and cutting down forests and encouraging domestic animals to graze on and destroy grasslands. Slash-and-burn agriculture, industrial tropical deforestation and overgrazing are rampant today. But forests are darker than grasslands, and grasslands are darker than deserts. As a consequence, the amount of sunlight that is absorbed by the ground has been declining, and by changes in the land use we are lowering the surface temperature of our planet. Might this cooling increase the size of the polar ice cap, which, because it is bright, will reflect still more sunlight from the Earth, further cooling the planet, driving a runaway albedo* effect? Our lovely blue planet, the Earth, is the only home we know. Venus is too hot. Mars is too cold. But the Earth is just right, a heaven for humans. After all, we evolved here. But our congenial climate may be unstable. We are perturbing our poor planet in serious and contradictory ways. Is there any danger of driving the environment of the Earth toward the planetary Hell of Venus or the global ice age of Mars? The simple answer is that nobody knows. The study of the global climate, the comparison of the Earth with other worlds, are subjects in their earliest stages of development. They are fields that are poorly and grudgingly funded. In our ignorance, we continue to push and pull, to pollute the atmosphere and brighten the land, oblivious of the fact that the long-term consequences are largely unknown.

The vast majority of energy that powers today’s global economy is from the sun. Some of that solar energy, such as sunshine and wind, arrives in real time each day. Some has been stored in recent times, like the energy bound up in crops, livestock and trees. And some has been stored up since ancient times, particularly the fossil fuels of oil, coal and gas. Which of these sources of solar energy the economy uses matters a great deal, and here’s why. It was thanks to the balance between real-time solar energy entering Earth’s atmosphere and heat escaping back out into space that Earth maintained a steady and benevolent average temperature during the Holocene. Over the past two hundred years, however, and especially since 1950, humanity’s use of ancient fossil-fuel energy has released carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere at an entirely unprecedented rate, with potentially dangerous consequences. Most of these gases occur naturally in the atmosphere and, together with water vapour, act like a blanket around the Earth, keeping its surface much warmer than it otherwise would be.

The world needs to provide more energy so the poorest can thrive, but we need to provide that energy without releasing any more greenhouse gases.

There are other downsides to synthetic fertilizer. To make it, we have to produce ammonia, a process that requires heat, which we get by burning natural gas, which produces greenhouse gases. Then, to move it from the facility where it’s made to the warehouse where it’s stored (like the place I visited in Tanzania) and eventually the farm where it’s used, we load it on trucks that are powered by gasoline. Finally, after the fertilizer is applied to soil, much of the nitrogen that it contains never gets absorbed by the plant. In fact, worldwide, crops take up less than half the nitrogen applied to farm fields. The rest runs off into ground or surface waters, causing pollution, or escapes into the air in the form of nitrous oxide—which, you may recall, has 265 times the global-warming potential of carbon dioxide.

In Indonesia, on the other hand, forests are being cut down to make way for palm trees, which provide the palm oil you’ll find in everything from movie-theater popcorn to shampoo. It’s one of the main reasons why the country is the world’s fourth-largest emitter of greenhouse gases.

I found myself imagining what America might look like if we could rally the country so that our government brought the same level of expertise and determination to educating our children or housing the homeless as it had to getting bin Laden; if we could apply the same persistence and resources to reducing poverty or curbing greenhouse gases or making sure every family had access to decent day care. I knew that even my own staff would dismiss these notions as utopian. And the fact that this was the case, the fact that we could no longer imagine uniting the country around anything other than thwarting attacks and defeating external enemies, I took as a measure of how far my presidency still fell short of what I wanted it to be—and how much work I had left to do.

Global warming will occur if the amount of sunlight absorbed by the Earth is increased (e.g. from less low cloud cover), or if the amount of infrared radiation lost to space is decreased (e.g. from more greenhouse gases, more water vapor, or more high cloud cover).

Greenhouse gases act like a radiative blanket within the atmosphere, warming the lower atmosphere and cooling the upper atmosphere.

And, because greenhouse gases remain in the atmosphere for so long, the planet will stay warm for a long time even after we get to zero.

It turns out the amount of methane produced by a given cow depends a lot on where the cow lives; for example, cattle in South America emit up to five times more greenhouse gases than ones in North America do, and African cattle emit even more. If a cow is being raised in North America or Europe, it’s more likely to be an improved breed that converts feed into milk and meat more efficiently. It will also get better veterinary care and higher-quality feed, which means it’ll produce less methane.

The notion that climate should remain the same over time is at the core of much of the recent discussion in the public square. Change—including fully natural climate revolutions and more frequent and moderate climate shifts—is understandably frightening. We naturally shy away from it. That’s why it’s actually comforting to believe the message of extreme environmentalists in recent years. Their argument is that we humans are in the process of destroying the world as we know it through our production of greenhouse gases, that we are the sole cause of current climate change. From that premise it follows that if we slash emissions of carbon dioxide greatly enough climate will stop changing. That’s actually reassuring compared to the view offered to us by the Earth herself. The fact is, if human beings had remained hunter-gatherers throughout our entire history, never producing a single molecule of greenhouse gases through agriculture or industry, climate today would still be changing. It would be lurching toward higher temperatures, crashing toward vastly colder temperatures, or at least swinging toward something different from what has been. That’s just the nature of Earth’s climate. It’s not to our liking, and it’s not to say we should do nothing about curtailing greenhouse gas emissions, but surely we must look the basic acts of natural change in the face if we are to have useful policy debates in the public square.

On long timescales, increases in temperature, controlled by the Earth’s orbit around the sun, create more methane and carbon dioxide. That’s right: from what most scientists can tell, greenhouse gases are not the primary driver of long-term climate change on Earth—Milankovitch’s orbital variations are. Still, everything about climate is complex, and it’s quite possible that greenhouse gases can help trigger changes at particular times, or they can help exaggerate feedback processes already underway on Earth. But it’s the orbital variations of the Earth around the sun—the three major interacting Milankovitch cycles—that give the general form to the ups and downs on the temperature plot in figure 11.2. Greenhouse gases and many other variables on Earth simply follow those ups and downs in temperature.

One emergent principle might be that deleterious elements should be concentrated. Concentrating people in cities is good. Concentrating energy waste products like nuclear spent fuel in casks is an improvement over distributing the greenhouse gases from spent coal and oil in the atmosphere. Concentrating our sources of food and fiber into high-yield agriculture, tree plantations, and mariculture frees up more wildland and wild ocean to carry out their expert Gaian tasks.

But how does metabolic scaling work when we look beyond mere individuals? Cities are the most obvious entity to investigate as they account for a disproportionately large share of global energy use: they house about 55 percent of humanity but consume nearly 70 percent of all energies and generate more than 70 percent of greenhouse gases.

In a final energy comeuppance, I came to regret leaving fusion out of my nuclear chapter. Like most, I figured it was too good to be possible—zero mining (the fuel is hydrogen), zero greenhouse gases, zero waste stream, zero meltdown capability, zero weaponization.

The bottom line: Advanced production systems need not produce noxious emissions, greenhouse gases, or toxic wastes, and could meet zero-tolerance emission regulations at little cost.

The recent science has looked more closely at the implications of all greenhouse gases not being the same. There is more explicit recognition that zero net emissions can be achieved through a combination of zero emissions for long-lived gases (carbon dioxide) and stable emissions for short-lived gases (methane).

A 2018 study concluded that even if we stopped emitting all greenhouse gases today, more than a third of the planet’s glacial ice would melt anyway in the coming decades.

But, as it turned out, that didn’t really happen. In the three decades since, global carbon emissions have nearly doubled. More than half of all the greenhouse gases emitted since the start of the Industrial Revolution have spewed from exhaust pipes and smokestacks since 1988.

The core of the issue is the same: inefficiency. Today, we must raise an entire cow to produce a single steak. We also need to deal with all the waste and the greenhouse gases that cow produces along the way, and dispose of the animal’s carcass on the back end.

As they photosynthesize, they produce hydrocarbons, which fuel their growth, and over the course of their lives, they store up to 22 tons of carbon dioxide in their trunks, branches, and root systems. When they die, the same exact quantity of greenhouse gases is released as fungi and bacteria break down the wood, process the carbon dioxide, and breathe it out again. The assertion that burning wood is climate neutral is based on this concept. After all, it makes no difference if it’s small organisms reducing pieces of wood to their gaseous components or if the home hearth takes on this task, right? But how a forest works is way more complicated than that. The forest is really a gigantic carbon dioxide vacuum that constantly filters out and stores this component of the air. It’s true that some of this carbon dioxide does indeed return to the atmosphere after a tree’s death, but most of it remains locked in the ecosystem forever.

The ominous realities of climate change forced a shift in my perspective. Each year, it seemed, the prognosis worsened, as an ever-increasing cloud of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases—from power plants, factories, cars, trucks, planes, industrial-scale livestock operations, deforestation, and all the other hallmarks of growth and modernization—contributed to record temperatures. By the time I was running for president, the clear consensus among scientists was that in the absence of bold, coordinated international action to reduce emissions, global temperatures were destined to climb another two degrees Celsius within a few decades. Past that point, the planet could experience an acceleration of melting ice caps, rising oceans, and extreme weather from which there was no return.

In contrast to his father, George W. Bush and members of his administration actively downplayed evidence of a warming planet and refused to engage in international efforts to curb greenhouse gases, despite the fact that for the first half of his presidency the United States ranked as the world’s largest emitter of carbon dioxide. As

And although it was hard to match his excitement over washers and dryers, the results really were pretty amazing: By the time I left office, those new appliance standards were on track to remove another 210 million metric tons of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere annually.

(Biodegradation is not necessarily the panacea it was once thought to be, since it releases greenhouse gases, while non-degradation, ironically, sequesters carbon.)

15 million years ago ice sheets began forming over Greenland, and by the beginning of the Quaternary the cooling had passed the threshold for the North Pole’s ice cap to begin expanding. We entered the current phase of pulsing ice ages.23 It seems the Earth has been committed to a concerted effort towards cooling down. What grand-scale planetary processes have been conspiring to drive this global chilling? Gases like carbon dioxide and methane, as well as water vapour, in the atmosphere act like the panes of glass in a greenhouse: they allow the short-wavelength visible sunlight to shine right through and heat the Earth, but block the longer-wavelength infrared light given off by the warm planet surface. The effect of these greenhouse gases is to trap heat energy from escaping back into space, and so insulate the planet, leading to higher temperatures. Any mechanism that reduces the amount of these greenhouse gases in the air will therefore drive a global cooling.

Not all human influences are warming. Aerosols are fine particles in the atmosphere such as those produced by the burning of low-quality coal. They cause severe health problems, contributing to millions of deaths per year. But they also make the globe more reflective both by directly reflecting sunlight and by inducing the formation of reflective clouds. Human-caused aerosols, together with changes in land use like deforestation (pasture is more reflective than forest), increase the albedo and so exert a net cooling influence that cancels about half of the warming influence of human-caused greenhouse gases.

By far the largest human influence on the climate system, and the one nearly all climate policy has focused upon, is the emission of greenhouse gases.

The most significant human-caused greenhouse gases influencing the climate are carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4). Their concentrations in the atmosphere are increasing because we’re emitting them; that’s why efforts to reduce human influences on the climate focus on reducing emissions.

Just like that cold weather gear, greenhouse gases in the atmosphere intercept and impede the flow of infrared heat from the earth’s surface into space. Some of that heat finds its way back down to the surface, where it causes additional warming

It’s often said that greenhouse gases “trap” heat, which gives the impression that the heat never escapes. But all of the heat must eventually be radiated to space to keep the planet in energy balance, as discussed earlier. The radiated heat must balance the absorbed solar energy very precisely, to within less than one-half a percent. If it didn’t, we’d see the earth warming or cooling much more rapidly than we do. So when discussing the effect of greenhouse gases on the heat flowing from the earth’s surface, a more appropriate metaphor is “catch and release.” For this reason, I’ll use the terms “intercept” and “impede” rather than “trap.

Water vapor is the most important of the greenhouse gases. Of course, the amount in the atmosphere at any given place and time varies greatly (the humidity changes a lot with the weather). But on average, water vapor amounts to only about 0.4 percent of the molecules in the atmosphere. Even so, it accounts for more than 90 percent of the atmosphere’s ability to intercept heat.

On a global scale we have the example of pollution. Individual humans have freely burned fossil fuels and greatly increased the amount of greenhouse gases such as CO2, leading to a continuing rise in the earth’s temperature over the last century. The tiny particles also emitted have caused lung diseases and deaths. But each polluter gains more individually from his own actions than he loses, so he has no direct pressure to change.

* To be sure, today Tyndall would probably be called a physicist, and he is best remembered for his pioneering investigations of the absorptive properties of atmospheric gases. He seems, in fact, to have been the first person to predict the greenhouse effect, which he did in 1861: On a fair November day the aqueous vapour in the atmosphere produced fifteen times the absorption of the true air of the atmosphere. It is on rays

Fifty-one billion is how many tons of greenhouse gases the world typically adds to the atmosphere every year.

insulation provided by the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, which raises our planet’s surface temperature to its observed value. How that insulation

How Much of the 51 Billion Tons Are We Talking About? Whenever I read something that mentions some amount of greenhouse gases, I do some quick math, converting it into a percentage of the annual total of 51 billion tons. To me, this makes more sense than the other comparisons you often see, like “this many tons is equivalent to taking one car off the road.” Who knows how many cars are on the road to begin with? Or how many cars we would have to take off the road to deal with climate change?

For example, some people argue, Yes, climate change is happening, but it’s not worth spending much to try to stop it or adapt to it. Instead, we should prioritize other things that have a bigger impact on human welfare, like health and education. Here’s my reply to that argument: Unless we move fast toward zero, bad things (and probably many of them) will happen well within most people’s lifetime, and very bad things will happen within a generation. Even if climate change doesn’t rank as an existential threat to humanity, it will make most people worse off, and it will make the poorest even poorer. It will keep getting worse until we stop adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, and it deserves to be as much of a priority as health and education.

Any serious discussion of the climate crisis must focus on atmospheric methane, much of it from livestock and food waste. Together they generate 12 percent of all greenhouse gases, or 7 gigatons of CO2e per year.

If the world’s 1 billion cows were a country, they’d rank third in greenhouse gases after China and the United States. Accounting for nearly two thirds of total livestock emissions, beef and dairy cattle dwarf the climate threat from all other farm animals combined, including pigs, chickens, lambs, goats, and ducks.

But our biggest enemies are all the knee-jerk politically correct folks who still don’t understand that wind power doesn’t lower greenhouse gases or fossil fuel use, but it destroys environments, property values, human health, millions of birds and bats and many other things. And that it only exists because of huge taxpayer subsidies, billions and billions that can never be repaid, money that goes straight into the pockets of the oil companies and investment banks behind these schemes … They make billions but never risk a cent.

These “point capture” devices have existed for decades, but they’re expensive to buy and operate, they generally capture only 90 percent of the greenhouse gases involved, and power companies don’t gain anything from installing them. So very few are in use.

For example, if the sixteen million acres now being used to grow corn to feed cows in the United States became well-managed pasture, that would remove fourteen billion pounds of carbon from the atmosphere each year, the equivalent of taking four million cars off the road. We seldom focus on farming’s role in global warming, but as much as a third of all the greenhouse gases that human activity has added to the atmosphere can be attributed to the saw and the plow.

Some of the scientists on Dr. Molina’s committee like to point out that people can be pretty intelligent about managing risk in their personal lives. It is unlikely that your house will burn down, yet you spend hundreds of dollars a year on insurance. When you drive to work in the morning, the odds are low that some careless driver will slam into you, but it is possible, so we have spent tens of billions of dollars putting seatbelts and air bags in our cars. The issue of how much to spend on lowering greenhouse gases is, in essence, a question about how much insurance we want to buy against worst-case outcomes.

an even more withering drought returned in 2010. Billions more trees perished, releasing their stored carbon. For the first time, the Amazon had become a net producer of greenhouse gases, rather than the world’s most important carbon sink.

the TTAPS study and the wider debate it ignited helped drive home the absurdity of nuclear strategies dependent on massive deterrence. The United States and the USSR had created a situation where even a limited nuclear conflict would cause a climate disaster that could quite possibly, among other things, collapse global agriculture, dooming civilization as we know it. With these weapons, there was no destroying your enemy without also destroying yourself. It brought to mind Stanley Kubrick’s brilliant Cold War dark comedy, Dr. Strangelove, in which the Soviets create a “doomsday machine” that will detonate if a nuclear war starts, rendering the entire world uninhabitable. The TTAPS nuclear winter study revealed that we had, unwittingly, built such a machine. These results were widely discussed in the security communities of both superpowers, and are often cited as helping to motivate the partial disarmament that both sides undertook as the Cold War wound down. Anti-Greenhouse In all these studies, Pollack and his collaborators were discovering variations that can be induced, by changes in quantities of gases or suspended particles, in a planetary greenhouse.

domesticated cows deliver more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than do all the world’s vehicles—autos, trucks, trains, aircraft, ships—combined. Deforestation

It has altered,” Leven says, “but only slightly. Nitrogen and oxygen, thank God, are still the main components. But the makeup is now one percent more oxygen, one percent less nitrogen. Greenhouse gases have returned to pre–Industrial Age levels.

Environmental issues would remain, as the carbon dioxide generated by the kilning of billions of bricks would probably be equivalent to the vast volume of greenhouse gases currently being produced by the cement industry (estimated to equal that produced by twenty-two million automobiles in the United States alone).

Plate tectonics helps regulate global temperatures by balancing greenhouse gases. There's also another natural thermostat, called the Earth's albedo. Albedo refers to the proportion of sunlight a planet reflects. The Earth has an especially rich variety of albedo sources -- oceans, polar ice caps, continental interiors, including deserts -- which is good for regulating the climate. Whatever light isn't reflected by Earth is absorbed, which means the surface gets heated. This is self-regulated through one of the Earth's natural feedback mechanisms. To give you an example, some marine algae produce dimethyl sulfide. This helps to build cloud condensation nuclei, or CCN, which are small particles in the atmosphere around which water can condense to form cloud droplets. If the ocean gets too warm, then this algae reproduce more quickly and release more dimethyl sulfide, which leads to a greater concentration of CCN and a higher albedo for the marine stratus clouds. Higher cloud albedo, in turn, cools the ocean below, which then reduces the rate at which the algae reproduce. So this provides a natural thermostat. -- Guillermo Gonzalez, Ph.D. (astronomer & physicist)

Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and since the 1950s, many of the observed changes are unprecedented over decades to millennia. The atmosphere and ocean have warmed, the amounts of snow and ice have diminished, sea level has risen, and the concentrations of greenhouse gases have increased

God cursed the snake, the woman and then the earth. The earth was flooded and all life destroyed but the curse remains. This planet is reeling and vomiting from the sin consciousness of lawless men. In my opinion, hurricanes, floods, volcanoes and other catastrophes are not the result of greenhouse gases or freak weather patterns, but the result of a sin in the consciousness of man throughout the earth.

term decision-makers,” says Pokorný. “To the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change], we have the atmosphere and in the atmosphere are greenhouse gases. If greenhouse gases go up, it’s a warmer climate. It’s different when you consider the biosphere and atmosphere and the energy balance between the universe and surface of the earth. There’s been a simplification of climate change, a train which goes along, driven by lawyers and business.” The CO2 mafia, as they’ve begun to regard it.

the coalition of Latin American and African governments making the case for climate debt actually stresses difference, zeroing in on the cruel contrast between those who caused the climate crisis (the developed world) and those who are suffering its worst effects (the developing world). Justin Lin, chief economist at the World Bank, puts the equation bluntly: “About seventy-five to eighty percent” of the damages caused by global warming “will be suffered by developing countries, although they only contribute about one-third of green-house gases.

Hasselmann’s key insight was that climate scientists faced the same basic problem as communications engineers: how to detect a weak signal—the thing you’re interested in—amid lots of noise that you don’t care about. In climate science, the noise is caused by phenomena that are internal to the climate system, such as El Niño. The “signal” is something caused by things that are external to the Earth’s natural climate system: the Sun, volcanic dust, or man-made greenhouse gases.

Yet in many cases, the social components were the dominant system drivers. It was often said, for example, that climate change was caused by increased atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases. Scientists understood that those greenhouse gases were accumulating because of the activities of human beings—deforestation and fossil fuel combustion—yet they rarely said that the cause was people, and their patterns of conspicuous consumption.

Think of Type X behavior as coal and Type I behavior as the sun. For most of recent history, coal has been the cheapest, easiest, most efficient resource. But coal has two downsides. First, it produces nasty things like air pollution and greenhouse gases. Second, it’s finite; getting more of it becomes increasingly difficult and expensive each year. Type X behavior is similar. An emphasis on rewards and punishments spews its own externalities (as enumerated in Chapter 2). And “if-then” motivators always grow more expensive. But Type I behavior, which is built around intrinsic motivation, draws on resources that are easily replenished and inflict little damage. It is the motivational equivalent of clean energy: inexpensive, safe to use, and endlessly renewable.