Anthropocene road trip!

 

One thing you often hear is, "Oh, the earth's climate changes all the time. Humans are so insignificant they don't really have an impact."

A few things to think about here:

Eunice Newton Foote (Sir Isaac Newton's daughter) published a paper in 1857 on the link between increased carbon dioxide in the air and a warmer climate. (For a while, science was considered a feminine pastime for ladies! Cool, huh?)

A couple of years later in 1857, Irish scientist John Tyndall discovered how coal gas (CO2) and other gasses trap heat in the atmosphere (the "greenhouse gas effect"). Since then, a bazillion researchers have confirmed and elaborated on these discoveries, but they are not new.

Burning oil, gas, and coal produces, mostly, CO2.

We have burned more oil, gas, and coal in the last 30 years than in all of human history.

Starting when humans began burning this stuff in an industrial scale around 1750, and rocketing up in recent decades, average Earth temperatures have gone up almost 2 degrees Fahrenheit total, according to this week's big report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

(The panel is not made of activists; it's a group of people whose job is to assemble confirmed research from 200 of the best climate labs from all over the world.)

The report also confirmed that Earth's CO2 levels definitely haven't been as high as they are now in 420,000 years, and "possibly 20 million years."

So burning coal/oil/gas=CO2=more heat.

(More heat=more water in air=extreme weather.)

So it's easy to see we did this.

The upside is that if we know we messed it up, it follows that we can also clean up our mess. It's past the point where we can fix it completely, but we can keep it from getting much, much worse.

I started writing this from White Bird, Idaho, where the average temperature for this time of year is listed at about 85, and the weather forecast today is for 103. We floated down a river yesterday that our guide said was only 1/3 normal levels. I finished writing this several days later...we've been in three states on this road trip, and only managed to escape the smoke (and red/purple air quality) one day in the whole week.

(We still had a blast, though!)

Want to know what you can do? This article has some good ideas: https://heated.world/p/what-can-i-do-anything

Sources:

https://www.npr.org/2021/08/12/1026989502/much-of-the-u-s-to-bake-under-stifling-heat-before-expected-relief-this-weekend

https://daily.jstor.org/how-19th-century-scientists-predicted-global-warming/

https://www.climate.gov/news-features/features/happy-200th-birthday-eunice-foote-hidden-climate-science-pioneer 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eunice_Newton_Foote

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Tyndall

https://earth.org/data_visualization/a-brief-history-of-co2/

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/TAR-03.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwiS4oWl46vyAhWC9Z4KHTOjDiwQFnoECDMQAQ&usg=AOvVaw3UOm_McBSMXAgeiR0bEoNW

https://climate.nasa.gov/climate_resources/24/graphic-the-relentless-rise-of-carbon-dioxide/