Tag Archives: COP 26 (Glasgow)

Cost of Climate Change

The Quadra Project: A Moment for Methane

Carbon dioxide (CO2—a single atom of carbon with two attached atoms of oxygen) gets most of the attention as the cause of global warming
because it can persist in the atmosphere for centuries. Methane is a
gas (CH4—a single carbon atom with four attached atoms of hydrogen)
that deserves attention, especially because every portion of a degree
is crucial in avoiding the worst consequences of global warming.

Although methane persists in the atmosphere for only about 20 years,
it is about 80 times more warming than carbon dioxide, so its
importance in the short term is critical. “Cutting methane is the
single most important strategy in slow near term warming,” says
Durwood Zaelke, the president of the Institute for Governance and
Sustainability (The Guardian Weekly, November 21, 2015). Its
pre-industrial atmospheric concentration was about 715 parts per
billion, and its 2025 level is presently measured at about 1930 ppb,
an increase of nearly 270%. Because of the short life of methane,
these high levels are maintained and increased by the continuous and
rising rate of emissions.

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Politics

Elizabeth May comes to Campbell River: Why Greens matter

Green Party leader Elizabeth May flew in from Ottawa on Saturday, May 6. She was the feature speaker at the North Island – Powell River Electoral District Association (EDA) AGM at the Maritime Heritage Centre in Campbell River. Around 60 people from Campbell River, Comox, Powell River, Port McNeil, Quadra Island and Cortes Island were in attendance.  

This is an edited transcript of her speech, and a couple of excerpts from the subsequent remarks made by local Green Party candidate Jessica Wegg.

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Uncategorized

The Quadra Project – 1.5 Degrees Celsius

The Paris Agreement is a legally binding international treaty on climate change, adopted by 196 Parties at COP 21 in Paris, on 12 December 2015. It entered into force on 4 November 2016, with the goal of limiting global warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius, with an aspirational target of 1.5°C, compared to pre-industrial levels.

At the COP 27 climate summit in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, in November 2022, only a few countries have updated their required annual carbon cutting emission targets for this year, and the United Nations’ Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, has described present efforts as so “woefully inadequate” that we are setting the world on track to “catastrophe”. Indeed, current CO2 emissions are rising at 1- 2% per year rather than going down 5-7% per year. Even under the voluntary “nationally determined contributions” of individual nations, emissions are expected to rise by 2030, in contrast to the nearly 50% reduction needed to keep the temperature rise at 1.5°C. At present emission levels, we are committed to a global temperature increase of 2.8°C by the end of the century.

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Cost of Climate Change

The Quadra Project: A poem for our time

The long narrative poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, was published in 1798 during the early years of the Industrial Revolution. Even by this time, however, the devastating consequence of burning coal to fuel the proliferation of factories was evident. Once pristine valleys were transformed into darkened wastelands of smoke and soot, bucolic streams and rivers were turned toxic black, quaint villages were converted to slums of indentured labourers, and the maw of multiple machines was making people into consumable and disposable objects. The artistic reaction to this perceived travesty was Romanticism, an effort to save humanity and nature from a revolution that was perceived to be destroying both.

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Cost of Climate Change

The Quadra Project: Taking our temperature

In February 2022, our planet was 1.19°C warmer than the pre-industrial temperature of 13.7°C calculated from the collected global records in the 1880s. The Industrial Revolution technically began about 100 years earlier, but no extensive measurements exist to verify the combined surface temperature of both land and water during those years. Between 1920 and 1940, the global temperature rose 0.1°C per decade, 0.2°C during the 1980s, and 0.61°C per decade since 2000. This ascending trajectory corresponds to a rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations from about 280 parts per million to about 420 ppm, and ends the 10,000 years of relative climate stability that has allowed human civilization to flourish.

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