Posts Tagged ‘climate change’
An Idiot’s Guide to the Environment
Posted by: Gav in Gavin Ayling's blog on July 6th, 2010
You may have heard a lot about being ‘environmentally friendly’ or of the advantages of recycling, or even about the poor ozone layer. But do those phrases leave you cold? Do you wonder whether the ‘environment’ is one issue or several? Well sit back as I try to make clear for you something that is really important, but that can be difficult to research without being bamboozled:
The Ozone Layer
People of a certain age will know that the ozone layer was in peril in the late 80s and early 90s. This was due to a particular gas used in aerosols and some refrigerators and similar electrical appliances that damaged this layer of the atmosphere. The ozone layer protects all living things from the harmful effects of the sun’s light. The gases that were the cause were CFCs. The sun’s light that was being let through was those rays in the ultraviolet.
What do I need to do?
The Ozone layer problems are largely historical and are not related to global warming or the need for recycling. If you have an old fridge or freezer (or even if it’s reasonably new) make sure it is disposed off legally and recycled!
Recycling
Recycling is important because there are finite amounts of some materials. For example, on Earth there is only a limited amount of each type of metal and metal cannot be created from anything else. Recycling is the only sensible way to manage these genuinely limited resources. So when you recycle a drinks can, a battery, tin foil or a tuna can, you are helping to stop the human race from running out of these metals. Recycling batteries is especially important as they contain mercury which is a rare metal and also extremely poisonous. The metal in domestic appliances is largely recycled these days as a result of the EU’s WEEE rules.
Plastic recycling is similar to metal recycling in that plastic is made of a material that there is a limited amount of (oil). When we run out of oil (even if that is centuries from now), we will not be able to make all the plastics that currently rely on fossil oil (that is, oil derived from long dead trees as opposed to oil that can be extracted from recently alive plants such as sunflower oil etc.) Another reason to recycle plastic is because of something that happens to the chemicals when they are made into plastic: they are made almost completely impervious to rotting.
Paper recycling is nowhere near so clear cut. The best argument is actually one about global warming, so I have left that to that section.
The main thing to note is that the main reasons for recycling are not related to global warming. There are serious environmental reasons to recycle, but the majority of them are not to do with global warming.
Global Warming
This is the daddy of the environmental causes. For this reason, like evolution in biology, it is often attacked by people who want to attack environmentalists generally.
Carbon Dioxide (or CO2 to use its chemical symbol) and some other gases have an effect on the atmosphere which helps it to absorb more of the sun’s energy. This has the effect of causing the atmosphere generally to warm up. There are other effects of a change to the chemical make-up of the air, but they are reasonably subtle and not worth mentioning in this initial guide.
The trouble with heating the atmosphere is that it causes ice in some parts of the world to melt. And when it melts, the colour of these areas changes from light to dark. This may sound like a small thing but it has the unfortunate effect of stopping sunlight from being reflected back out into space, further heating the Earth.
The main thing when considering how to manage global warming (more properly, global climate change) is what causes an increase in the overall amount of CO2. The easy answer is burning things, but that is not always the case. If you plant a tree, it absorbs an amount of atmospheric carbon. When you burn that tree, you release some of that carbon back into the air. But what you have not done is contributed much to climate change. The real problem is when carbon that has been buried for a long period of time is released. That is mostly carbon trapped in coal and fossil oil and gas.
There are arguments about the benefit of using the bus or train over your car, and there are some odd results of different activities, but the principle is simple — if you can be more efficient when using electricity or your car, you will be helping.
The odd results are things like local vs. foreign farming. Some research has found that even with the fuel burning required in shipping a fruit product from Africa to England, there are fewer emissions attributable to the African product because of the greater mechanisation of English farms. It is difficult to legislate for that sort of effect, but it’s best not to worry about that sort of thing.
Some people will also point out that the climate is not usually stable and that it may not be human activity that is causing the changes in climate we can all now see. While that may be true to some extent, very little harm is done by trying to reduce our use of limited resources such as fossil fuels. So why not be more efficient anyway?!
I mentioned earlier that paper recycling could be considered a global warming mitigating environmentally friendly activity. I said this because when paper goes into landfill, it will decompose in a way that causes the greenhouse gas, methane, to be released. Unfortunately for the environment, methane is actually even more effective at trapping the sun’s energy than carbon dioxide. The same thing happens when food waste is binned, so do consider whether there is some way you can compost.
Conclusion
Next time someone says that they are doing something environmentally friendly, I hope this has helped you understand how that activity is environmentally friendly; I hope, too, that it has helped you understand that there is a difference between the environmental causes.
If you would like to learn more, or take part in discussion, take a look at the Green Living Grog
Chaos and Climate Change
Posted by: Gav in Gavin Ayling's blog on February 28th, 2009
Like many lay-people I have long suspected that chaos theory is another of those scientific theories that tend through history, to emerge at the edges of understanding and which do not seek to understand. Instead they resort to giving things names and claiming that they cannot be resolved.
Irritable Bowel Syndrome is one of those. I am absolutely positive there is no such thing. Nor is there such a thing as Ulcerative Colitis. Don’t get me wrong, these symptoms are definitely real and destroy or seriously hamper people’s lives, but what I believe is that these ailments are actually descriptions of symptoms of an as-yet not understood illness or disease. I am sure, for example, that some people diagnosed as having IBS actually have Coeliac Disease, and others have other conditions.
Similarly, in physics and mathematics we are told that some systems are so complex that they cannot be modelled mathematically — the climate is one. To such an extent that a butterfly flapping its wing in Africa could make the difference between a hurricane developing or not in on the way to Florida. This, it seemed to me, was admitting defeat. We are, by calling a system chaotic, I thought, saying “That’s too hard.”
But it turns out, not for the first time, I was wrong. What chaos theory actually says is that for a sufficiently complex system minute changes to input can make no difference for a long time. Much later in time the difference in input can suddenly manifest itself in a different result. Far from saying “This is too hard” Chaos Theory says that we can expect different results but without knowing all the parameters, we cannot know the outcome due to the massive influence of minor changes to conditions. It is not defeatist, it just describes a counter-intuitive mathematical phenomenon.
But this blog is mostly about politics, why am I telling you this?
Actually, I am telling the lay-people in the hope of getting an answer from a non-lay person. Climate models that predict climate change (and, according to some, global warming) cannot have all the necessary inputs for obvious reasons: no climate model could monitor the flap of every butterfly’s wing, nor could any model monitor the location even of local gusts of wind. To try to get around this flaw, scientists have used models that accurately report the past from the early 1800s to today.
If a model successfully models temperatures for 200 years, they assert, then that model must be a reasonable approximation of actual events and so can be used to predict future events. If a model is ‘right’ in this sense, then if it says the climate will warm by a certain amount with a particular amount of carbon added to the atmosphere, that is what will happen.
I don’t know enough about the climate to know whether they will be right or wrong, and surely evidence to date does point towards an increase in global average temperatures but doesn’t chaos theory suggest that these climate models cannot possibly have a clue?
If the tiniest inputs to the climate models could have unexpected results at unpredictable times in the future, and if we are using approximations by necessity, doesn’t that mean that even the best model could spike wildly in one direction or another? And if the inputs are slightly (1 tenth of one percent even) different, doesn’t that throw into doubt any results that come out of those models?
