We’ve been release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere ever since we learned to use fire. However it would probably be unfair to blame our early ancestors for our current predicament given their lives were otherwise very low impact on the natural environment. It is only since the Industrial Revolution that our addiction to fossil fuels has reached any kind of scale, so which countries have caused the most carbon emissions in the period since then?

Here we are in the year 2023, and the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has told us that humans are unequivocally responsible for global warming and that some of the impacts of climate change can no longer be avoided. Before we start looking at what we need to do going forward, let’s take a look at how we got here in the first place.

We’ve previously shared an estimate of global greenhouse gas emissions for 2021 of 54.59 Gt. But that figure is just a snapshot in time. How does it compare to other years and what is our best guess of how many gigatonnes of CO2e can we release into the atmosphere before we exceed the Paris Agreement’s target of 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming?

Now we know about GWPs and CO2e, where did that global greenhouse gas emissions figure of 54.59 Gt of CO2e come from? And more importantly, how can we have confidence that it is an accurate figure?

Before we took a little detour into the world of fossil fuels, we’d talked about what greenhouse gases were and where they came from. Now, let’s talk a little about how we measure the emission of greenhouse gases.

Remember Dr John Sterman from the bathtub analogy? In the same article he said: "The science is unequivocal now. It's urgent that we reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. That debate is basically over." One way to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions would be to use fewer (or no) fossil fuels. Unfortunately it’s not that simple though. You see, there are significant actors, both states and companies, that make a lot of money selling fossil fuels and who would stand to lose a lot if things changed.

Thinking about fossil fuel consumption in terms of kilowatt-hours, which according to Wikipedia is “a composite unit of energy equal to one kilowatt (kW) sustained for one hour”, as we did yesterday can be quite abstract. One other way to cut the data is to look at the overall percentages coal, oil, and natural gas make up in our overall fossil fuel use:

In the previous post we covered the fact coal was initially the most used fossil fuel, before oil and natural gas came online later. This chart from Our World in Data is a great visualisation of how the mix of fossil fuels we use has changed from 1850 to today.

Having established that fossil fuels have been around on this planet a lot longer than we have, let’s look at a timeframe that’s a bit easier to grasp - our own history with fossil fuels. You may have thought, as I did, that humans only began using fossil fuels at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth century. However, there is evidence that we had been using them for a lot longer.

Since the Industrial Revolution, our world has run on fossil fuels. So what are they, and where do they come from? Fossil fuels are defined as “any of a class of hydrocarbon-containing materials of biological origin occurring within Earth’s crust that can be used as a source of energy”. What that means is that fossil fuels - coal, oil, and natural gas - are the remnants of fossilized plants and animals from millions of years ago.

We’ve talked about where greenhouse gases come from and we’ll cover specific sources in upcoming posts. So why are they such a problem? The best analogy I’ve seen for explaining why our greenhouse gas emissions, if left unchecked, could cause climate catastrophe is one developed by Dr John Sterman at the MIT Sloan School of Management back in 2008.

After a few days looking at the news, we’re back into the nitty gritty of climate change. We previously talked about what greenhouse gases are and how much of the atmosphere they make up. There are a number of ways to cut the data on the sources of greenhouse gas emissions, but before we get to that let’s take a moment to understand where they come from.

The New Zealand government today announced it was partnering with NZ Steel to help it reduce the 800,000 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions it produces each year, in what it says is the country’s largest decarbonisation project.

As Nicole Jennings’ cartoon in The Guardian indicates, the 1.5 degrees increase countries pledged to try and limit global warming to is fast approaching.

The New York Times has a fascinating about Indonesian President Joko Widodo’s plans to build a new capital city for the country. The current capital, Jakarta, has swelled to a population of over 30 million and a combination of its citizens illegally draining its underground aquifers for water and sea level rise caused by climate change means the city is literally sinking into the sea. 40 per cent of Jakarta now sits below sea level.

Following on from last Friday’s post about the UAE’s presidency of COP28, the approach being pursued by them on behalf of the oil and gas industry has been criticised by Christiana Figueres, the former Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

Charity Christian Aid has found that even if we manage to keep global warming to the Paris Agreement target of 1.5-2 degrees Celsius, by 2100 there will be 54% less land available for coffee production. A combination of rising temperatures, erratic rainfall, disease, droughts and landslides are making it harder to produce coffee.

I came across this cartoon in the StarTribune, which is based in the US state of Minnesota. Although the distractions are US-centric, this cartoon could easily be changed to be relevant to any country. Issues like the cost of living crisis, war in Ukraine and elsewhere around the world, the coronavirus pandemic have meant that climate change is often pushed to the back of the queue. How much longer can we afford to do that?

Occasionally, we’re reminded that despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary there are climate change deniers out there. And to make matters worse, they still hold positions of authority. The Montana Free Press has a story about the US state of Montana’s legislature has passed a law that bars the state from considering climate impacts in its analysis of large projects such as coal mines and power plans.

The BBC reports some good news from the UK. In the first three months of 2023 wind turbines generated more electricity than gas for the first time. In fact 42% of the UK’s electricity came from renewable energy vs. 33% from fossil fuels.