Climatebase Fellowship - Week 2

Learnings

The history of climate change science mainly revolves around dead white men
Eunice Foote mentioned again
- We don't have a photo of her
- If you do a search another woman shows up
- Still a middle class white privileged lady
- Did not realize the importance of her discovery
Svante Arrhenius
- Distant relative of Greta Thunberg
- Did climate maths on the side
- He was actually worried about the world getting colder
- Thought burning coal would be a positive
Guy Stewart Callendar noted a 0.3 degree temperature increase in his lifetime
Roger Revelle ran the first funded, professional climate science project
Wallace Smith Broecker published a paper in 1975 which popularized the phrase "global warming"
We've been left with a mess, but we've been left with resources
Often the debate is framed on science, but we also need to look at people

Let's switch the view of Africa being a problem to a solution
Africa has creativity, youth and growth to offer
Doesn't make sense to make decisions without the people most affected in the room
Global north is bound to the fate of the south
Should biggest polluters pay reparations for crises in other countries?
The story of the hummingbird and the forest fire

CO2 is being released at the fastest rate in the last 66 million years
Extremely hot days are around 150x more likely than they used to be
The biggest greenhouse gas emissions are: carbon dioxide (76%), methane (16%), nitrous oxide (6%), hydrofluorocarbons (<2%), perfluorocarbons (<1%), sulphur hexafluoride (<1%), nitrogen triflouride (<1%)
Drawdown is the point where greenhouse gas emissions start going down
Main sectors where emission reduction is required are: electricity, energy, food, agriculture, land use, industry, transport & building
There is already hundreds of billions private climate funding. But it's not enough, we need a lot more & huge public funding
Transport is over funded right now in comparison to other sectors
If people cared, they'd do more is a myth
Climate change association with mental health is now well known
- Sometimes called ecological grief / anxiety
Coral has annual spawning event when eggs are laid
Closing the ozone layer was a very successful goal
Carbon credits can be an excuse for not changing destructive behavior
- But its not possible for all companies to meet net 0. That's where offsetting can help