April 22 was Earth Day – a quiet Earth Day, this year, with few events and activities on the calendar.
But over at Cookstown ideaLAB & Library on Tuesday evening, a speaker provided a primer of the ABCs of Climate Change.
Dr. Bradley Dibble, a cardiologist and passionate member of the Climate Reality Project, spoke about climate change and how to make a difference for families and the planet. He provided a look at the scientific realities, the myths and misstatements surrounding climate change.
Dibble said his involvement began in 2006, when he first saw Al Gore’s documentary, An Inconvenient Truth.
“I was always one of those scientist, geeky kids,” Dibble said. “I was just flabbergasted that there was stuff I didn’t know.”
It led him to read Gore’s book, and to delve deeper – reading everything he could on climate change, its causes and cascade of environmental impacts as carbon-dioxide levels and atmospheric temperatures rise: heat waves, more extreme weather leading to more flooding events (for every degree the air warms, it can hold seven per cent more moisture), stronger storm surges, and the rise in sea level linked to melting ice sheets.
It also led him to write his own book, Comprehending the Climate Crisis, a book “that could be read in a weekend, that my mother could understand.”
He also trained with Al Gore and became a mentor at one of the Climate Reality Project Canada sessions.
The science of climate change isn’t new, Dibble said. More than 100 years ago, John Tyndall identified the properties of carbon dioxide and methane that allow them to create a greenhouse effect in the atmosphere.
“They’ll let visible light through but trap the infrared,” the heat re-radiated by the Earth’s surface, Dibble noted.
And, in general, that’s a good thing; without greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the Earth’s average temperature would be -18 C.
The problem is that carbon-dioxide levels have been increasing since the start of the Industrial Revolution. Detailed measurements show that since 1958, those levels have increased by two parts per million each year, and “it’s still going up and up and up,” said Dibble.
The level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was approximately 368 parts per million in 2000, and, as of April 20, 2019, the level was 414.06 ppm, he said. It doesn’t take much to intensify the greenhouse effect.
Dibble acknowledged there have been cyclical fluctuations in carbon dioxide levels and temperatures over the past 800,000 years, as evidenced in ice cores. Those fluctuations have been related to the wobble of the Earth’s axis, in relation to the sun, he said, but the Earth’s wobble doesn’t explain the off-the-chart spike in levels in the past decades.
“You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to see it’s off the curve,” Dibble said, pointing out that the last five years have been the hottest ever recorded, globally.
As for climate-change deniers who claim that scientists disagree on the reality and causes of climate change, they “really couldn’t be more wrong,” he said. “You can’t find any national academy of science that disagrees… Global warming is real, and it is caused by us.”
In fact, 98 per cent of scientists agree as to the reality and cause - and in peer-reviewed publications, he said, only 0.17 per cent of scientists disagree.
As for statistics that have been cited by some politicians south of the border, he suggested they appear to be fabricated.
One republican senator claimed that “volcanoes emit more carbon dioxide than man.” The reality is that volcanoes emit 0.15 to 0.26 gigatons of carbon dioxide per year; man’s emissions amount to 38.2 gigatons per year, Dibble said.
And the claim that global warming is caused by sunspots or solar activity? “Solar activity does fluctuate,” admitted Dibble, but science looks at the long-term trends, from numerous sources, not a short time span from a single location.
Sunspot activity “has actually reached a minimum in the last 100 years. It’s been dropping as the temperature has been rising,” he said. “You can’t use just one year, you have to look over the whole span.”
Year to year, temperatures may drop and ice levels in the Arctic, Antarctic and Greenland increase – but looking at the data since records have been kept, the overall trend in global temperatures has been upwards.
“The myths are red herrings,” said Dibble. “There are groups out there that don’t want you to believe it… because you’ll act,” and the potential solutions “don’t tend to be in keeping with their models of infinite economic growth.”
Dibble spoke of the “three Rs” of the environment – reduce, reuse and recycle – and suggested adding a fourth: rethink.
The world is spending vast sums on battling terrorism – yet the average number of deaths as a result of terrorism is 10 per year in the U.S., or 25,000 globally, he said, urging his listeners to compare that to 3.5 million deaths per year due to diabetes, and seven million deaths per year due to air pollution, which contributes to heart disease, lung disease and pediatric asthma.
Reframing the climate-change issue as a fight against pollution could work, he suggested. “If you fight pollution, you’re actually going to fight global warming.”
Dibble encouraged individual Canadians to “be more efficient with energy use": to embrace car-pooling, ban idling, eat local produce rather than relying on imports that are shipped long-distances, and practice energy conservation. Switching to LED lighting from incandescent and even compact fluorescent bulbs, replacing old appliances with energy efficient models, and turning down the thermostat and the lights to save energy and money.
Make a conscious decision when purchasing to avoid single-use plastics and wasteful packaging.
And most importantly, plant trees. If we’re looking for a device to “magically scrub CO2 (carbon dioxide) out of the atmosphere,” it’s a tree, Dibble said. “One tree can store 22 kilograms of carbon dioxide per year.” Simply replanting forests could help Canada achieve 37 per cent of its target reduction in emissions.
Above all, he added, “get involved. Dr. (David) Suzuki says this is the defining challenge of your generation," he said. "I think we can do lots."
Before Dibble's presentation, he was introduced by librarian and Cookstown branch manager Susan Baues, who quoted 16-year-old Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg’s address to the European Union: “It will require Cathedral thinking” to solve environmental challenges. “It is not too late to act. It will take a far-reaching vision, it will take a fierce, fierce determination to act now, to lay the foundations where we may not know all the details about how to shape the ceiling.”
Dibble agreed. “The problem is going to require global efforts all coming together,” he said, comparing the fight against climate change to the fight against Nazism in the Second World War.
“It’s going to require that same sort of global effort. Otherwise our grandchildren are going to say, 'You knew about it for 100 years and you did nothing?' It’s going to take a Herculean effort.”
