Cause for Climate Hope
and some food for thought ...
Last week I shared a good news story about the health consequences of fixing the ozone layer. I’ve received some great feedback on that. More about it in a future post.
The news about climate change is far less positive. We’re told that many of our youth are despondent about inaction on it, and the future world we’re consigned to. My colleague, Ben Liley, recently provided a more hopeful perspective.
NIWA colleague Ben Liley tending to instruments at Lauder that measure solar radiation.
If you seek reassurance, it’s well worth a read. His bottom ‘line’ is
“My advice to today’s youth is not to be despondent, but certainly they should be impatient for action. We have till now achieved far too little to counter climate change, but we should proceed with confidence that a cleaner, healthier, and fairer world awaits.”
And some more food for thought …
If you want to feel better (for your physical health as well as your mental health), you could try eating less meat. A recent paper published in Nature showed that can have a big effect on harmful emissions. It showed that if we all reduced our meat consumption by 20 percent, then by 2050 the amount of deforestation required to sustain that production and the amount of carbon dioxide emitted from those changes in land-use would halve. There would be significant reductions in other greenhouse gases too.
Sounds good, but let’s put it into perspective. Reductions in the CO2 emitted from those dietary changes amount to about a billion tons per year. It sounds a lot, and it is a lot. But those reductions from changes in land use are small compared with our total emissions, which are close to 40 billion tons per year. Most of that is from the continued burning of fossil fuels.
The good news is that Vladimir Putin is rapidly forcing Europe away from that path to destruction. Hopefully the rest of the world will follow suit.
Thanks for reading this. Previous posts on the intersection between Ozone, UV, Climate, and Health can be found at my UV & You area at Substack.