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The climate crisis explained in 10 charts

From the rise and rise of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to possible solutions

Damian Carrington and Cath Levett

Thu 19 Sep 2019 22.29 BST

 Billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide are sent into the atmosphere every year from coal, oil and gas burning. Photograph: Oliver Berg/AFP/Getty Images

The problem – rising carbon dioxide in the atmosphere

The level of CO2 has been rising since the industrial revolution and is now at its highest for about 4 million years. The rate of the rise is even more striking – the fastest for 66m years – with scientists saying we are in “uncharted territory”.

The causes – fossil fuel burning

Billions of tonnes of CO2 are sent into the atmosphere every year from coal, oil and gas burning. There is no sign of these emissions starting to fall rapidly, as is needed.

The causes – forest destruction

The felling of forests for timber, cattle, soy and palm oil is a big contributor to carbon emissions. It is also a major cause of the annihilation of wildlife on Earth.

The consequences – global temperature rise

The planet’s average temperature started to climb steadily two centuries ago, but has rocketed since the second world war as consumption and population has risen. Global heating means there is more energy in the atmosphere, making extreme weather events more frequent and more intense.

The consequences – ice melting in Greenland

Greenland alone is now losing almost 4 trillion tonnes of ice per year. Mountain ranges from the Himalayas to the Andes to the Alps are also losing ice rapidly as glaciers shrink. A third of the Himalayan and Hindu Kush ice is already doomed.

The consequences – rising sea levels

Sea levels are inexorably rising as ice on land melts and hotter oceans expand. Sea levels are slow to respond to global heating, so even if the temperature rise is restricted to 2C, one in five people in the world will eventually see their cities submerged, from New York to London to Shanghai.

The consequences – shrinking Arctic sea ice

As heating melts the sea ice, the darker water revealed absorbs more of the sun’s heat, causing more heating – one example of the vicious circles in the climate system. Scientists think the changes in the Arctic may be responsible for worsened heatwaves and floods in Eurasia and North America.

The upside (I) – wind and solar energy is soaring

Huge cost drops have seen renewable energy become the cheapest energy in many places and the rollout is projected to continue. Analysts also expect coal use to fall. But much government action is still required to reach the scale needed, and solve difficult problems such as aviation and farming.

The upside (II) – electric vehicles

The global fleet of electric cars and vans is still small compared with those running on fossil fuels. But sales are growing very fast. Electric cars are cheaper to run, suggesting they will become mainstream.

The upside (III) – battery costs

Renewable energy is intermittent, depending on when the sun shines or wind blows. So storage is vital and the cost of batteries is plummeting. But other technologies, such as generating hydrogen, will also be needed.

As the crisis escalates…

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/sep/20/the-climate-crisis-explained-in-10-charts

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My Comments : 

1. This crisis - whereby human kind is knowingly and rapidly destroying its own and only habitat (and the habitat of many other now endangered species) - does transcend ALL other crises concerning our planet. 

2. But (up to this very day) this crisis does receive only a fraction of the political effort (versus the odd tidal waves of media attention) needed to effectively counter and solve this existential problem of global magnitude.... 

3. Reports, composed already a decade or so ago by agencies like the CIA, do warn, that if mankind does not engage this existential crisis immediately structurally and systematically, this will necessarily lead to deadly regional climate catastrophes, accumulating into major migration movements, leading up to major climate wars. 

4. Democracy - a relatively recent and rather vulnerable phenomenon in the struggle for social emancipation - in all probability will be the first victim in the race for survival, triggered by the human originated devastating climate change (and major health-threats produced by other forms of pollution, like ultra-fine toxic particles). 

5. Hard-right populism, racism, fascism and ultra-nationalism (the proponents par excellence of climate denial and the self-declared opponents of science and international bodies like the UN / IPCC) will be - apart from unlimited predatory consumerism and all the mechanisms connected to it - the first adversaries to combat in the years to come. 

6. This political (and physical) struggle in itself might appear to be the first hurdle to overcome....

N.B. Do be aware of the astonishing fact that major oil companies like Shell and Exxon had already established high standard scientific knowledge from secret studies by these companies about the devastating effect from carbon dioxide on the atmosphere in the seventies and eighties.

The USA department of Energy did possess the very same information at the very same  time, only to suppress any political measure that might have prevented the apocalyptic and dystopian future mankind has to encounter sixty years later.

We still do owe much of our gratitude and intellectual appreciation to the founding father of climate science James Hansen who in the eighties laid the groundwork for the understanding of global warming, only to be hounded away by the captains of mineral oil and coal mining industries like the Koch Brothers.

The Koch Brothers nowadays are notorious for manipulating the USA legislative and executive branches by organised scientific deception, dis-informing the electorate and systematically (lawfully among others by super-PAC constructs) bribing politicians.