Climate Change – The Facts / David Attenborough – BBC (2019)

This documentary has a very urgent message (so urgent that I don’t even have time to write up an accompanying text about it!). It is a call to arms. Climate change from global warming due to Human activities is now a well-established fact. Global atmospheric carbon dioxide level is now more than 410 ppm. In fact, you can check the most up to date atmospheric CO2 reading from Hawaii yourself. We have less than a decade to curb our emissions and transition into a carbon/fossil fuel-free energy generation. This is the only way forward to prevent climatic and environmental catastrophes that are already beginning to intensify. A report from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) makes an accurate encapsulation of the problems we are facing as Humans in five graphs.

#ClimateChangeTheFacts

The cost of action is dwarfed by the cost of inaction.

In 2018 a New York Times article detailed the story of how fossil fuel industry prevented the World to take action against global warming. In 2006 Al Gore’s hugely informative film “An Inconvenient Truth” did a great job in conveying the causes of the climate crisis for public understanding.

We have great economical reasons to abandon fossil fuels as well: 74% Of US coal plants are now more expensive than new renewables. Coal has been a massive contributor to the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere leading to mercury pollution with subsequent biomagnification throughout the food chain. Some geologists propose that fossil fuel use including coal may be accepted as an indicator for the start of a new Human-dominated era called the Anthropocene.

The documentary highlights a few crucial points including decarbonization, deforestation and growing threat of melting permafrost releasing trapped methane which would lead to even more stronger runaway greenhouse effect. Despite the dedicated engineering for more than a century the efficiency of the best internal combustion engines don’t exceed 20 % (most of the energy is lost as heat). However most ordinary electric motors have an efficiency above 80 %. Change is coming. Not only in the land but also in the air. Clearly the electric is future but can we make it?

Increase in atmospheric CO2 brings another global problem called Ocean Acidification which will affect fisheries by disrupting the very base of the food-webs. Increasing acidity makes it corrosive dissolving the calcium shells of marine organisms.

One dreadful consequences of global warming is the release of methane trapped in permafrost and cold ocean bottoms which has a big potential to accelerate warming when released into the atmosphere. Clathrate gun hypothesis summarizes how trapped methane residues can get released into the atmosphere in bursts of rapid succession. Unfortunately, the hypothesis seems to become a reality since large craters began appearing in Siberian soils which resemble bombholes. Russian scientists attribute their formation due to methane release predicted by the clathrate gun hypothesis.