By Patricia Houser
For Nature’s Sake
Patricia Houser
To the many numbers we carry around in our heads – whether it’s the price of gas, historical dates or a recipe for hot chocolate – we might consider adding a few key climate statistics. While not as diverting as a fine golf score or as immediately useful as a phone number, there are at least a few numbers related to global warming and the problems of fossil fuels that each of us, as earth inhabitants, owe it to ourselves and each other to know.
Consider the three numbers below, for instance, as part of a starter kit in climate literacy. Like medical statistics for individual health, they may help us make sense of the news and better weigh needed interventions to promote planetary health.
1.5°C: The 1.5°C number, equivalent to 2.7°F, refers to a possible global average temperature rise that experts have cautioned us to avoid. During the 2015 Paris climate talks, the 1.5°C increase over pre-industrial temperatures was agreed upon as a danger zone – like a speed limit – above which planetary damage and suffering will be unconscionable. Because overall increasing temperatures at the earth’s surface have been definitively linked to fossil fuels, the ominous prospect of a 1.5-degree rise has been used as an incentive for ending support for coal, oil and gas and more quickly shifting to renewable energy sources.
This may seems like a small temperature rise if considered in terms of daily weather, but when it comes to average annual rises across the globe since the preindustrial era, even changes in tenths of a percent have caused extreme weather disturbances and environmental changes. “1.5 to stay alive,” has been a rallying cry of island nation residents and others on the front lines of most recent so-called climate shocks.
Not that we need wait to exceed 1.5 degrees to see disastrous outcomes of Earth’s warming. Last year, when the average temperature rise at the earth’s surface, over the preindustrial era, was 1.18°C, there were near-constant record-breaking heat waves, floods, fires and storms around the world, including the fires and heat dome in Canada that sent smoky air our way in the spring and summer.
If we don’t reduce carbon emissions soon enough, how soon could we reach the 1.5 limit? Scientific American suggests we have a 50 percent chance of reaching that average temperature rise in six years. Meanwhile, the picture of habitat loss and human suffering predicted, depending on whether the earth heats 1.5 degrees or up to 2 degrees, amounts to a sliding scale of suffering. In the case of coral reefs, for instance, according to NASA’s climate change website, a global average temperature rise of 1.5°C would lead to the loss of 70 to 90 percent of coral reefs, but at 2°C degrees of warming (3.6°F) there would be no coral reefs left in the world.
COP 28: COP stands for Conference of the Parties, which seems a bland name for a global group that meets yearly to, no less, rescue the planet. “28” refers to the number of years that the world’s nations have been meeting to follow up on an early treaty to address the threat of climate change. The countries that have signed onto that treaty, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, are called “parties” to the treaty, and the first conference of the parties, or COP 1, to help implement the UNFCCC took place in Berlin in 1995.
Other international groups that meet to follow-up on treaty requirements are also called COPs; for instance, countries that are working to implement a biodiversity treaty held their “COP 15” in Montreal in 2022.
Countries that have signed onto climate reforms take turns as hosts for the United Nations Climate Change Conference. The 2023 meeting, or COP 28, was held in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. This earned it some well-deserved critiques, including the Wall Street Journal’s Nov. 29 article, “Welcome to COP28, the U.N. Climate Conference Hosted by an Oil Giant.” Meanwhile the meeting scheduled for later this year, or COP 29, will be hosted by Azerbaijan, a country where the main exports (90 percent) are oil and gas.
One takeaway on the number 28 is that, at the very least, the global community has agreed on the seriousness of climate disruption for several decades. As people with a stake in the outcome, we should understand what is going right, and wrong, at these meetings. To start, a useful short summary of COP 28 can be found in a Dec. 13 article from the Guardian titled, “Good Cop, bad Cop: what the COP 28 agreement says and what it means.”
40 Percent: This is the number we could impact most directly in our communities. Forty percent of greenhouse gas emissions in Connecticut come from transportation, the largest source in the state. That’s according to a report on emissions released by the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection in April 2023.
To the extent that pollution, like politics, is local, residents of Milford and Orange have an opportunity to focus on this last statistic in a way that could help us set an example to other parts of the state. We can take our cue, in lowering transportation emissions, from a Yale Climate Connection piece that implied any plan to lower carbon pollution from transportation should include both a switch to electric vehicles and strategies to reduce driving.
While the state is now providing incentives (rebates) for citizens to purchase
EVs, that leaves room for local communities to make crucial further reductions in pollution from cars through a mixture of anti-sprawl zoning strategies, constructing bona fide protected bike lanes and reducing idling drastically.
Hopefully, the above numbers will provide insights to help us better participate in our community’s efforts to survive and avoid the worst of climate challenges. Succeeding may afford future generations the luxury to mull less ominous numbers.
Patricia Houser, PhD, AICP, shares her exploration of local and regional environmental issues in this column as a member of the nonpartisan Milford Environmental Concerns Coalition.