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Carbon Dioxide
The one flimsy argument climate change deniers have been holding onto — that it will make plants grow faster and bigger — has proven to be a poor one.
As well as being a faulty assertion, pointing out the many uses for fossil fuels in an attempt to reject the need to reduce reliance on them is actually an argument in favour of burning less coal, gas and oil. Fossil fuels are useful for many purposes, so why extract, transport and burn them so rapidly and wastefully?
In this "post-truth" era, with a climate-change-denying U.S. administration, those who want to keep humanity wedded to outdated, polluting technologies have been emboldened. It's up to the rest of us to cut through the misinformation and help humanity get on track to a cleaner, healthier future.
Climate change is "Made in China," but they get off scot-free. We need to admit one simple truth: handicapping Canadians with a tax will have zero effect on global climate change. However, that doesn't mean we can't exert influence and pursue real solutions.
Life evolved to live within limits. It's a delicate balance. Humans need oxygen, but too much can kill us. Plants need nitrogen, but excess nitrogen harms them, and pollutes rivers, lakes and oceans. Ecosystems are complex. Our health and survival depend on intricate interactions that ensure we get the right amounts of clean air, water, food from productive soils and energy from the sun.
Last week marked the 10th anniversary of An Inconvenient Truth, the Al Gore documentary that catapulted climate change onto the global agenda. Here's a quick look at developments over the past decade, both the inconvenient and the convenient.
We keep hearing about the need to keep global climate change below a target of two degrees Celsius. However, few people know where this comes from. The reason for this is that the target is one of the most deliberately muddied topics in the climate change debate -- not a scientific number, but a political one.
Perhaps you've heard of the notion of a global carbon quota. I first learned of it a few years ago, and got a refresher on the subject last month. It jolted me then, but even more so this time. Here's an overview, with some basic math.
Most of us want to do something good for the environment. An easy way is to spend a few dollars buying carbon offsets, perhaps to make us feel less guilty about that long-haul flight we're planning. Turns out those offsets could be more valuable than we thought.
To further underscore the risks: Indonesia's forests contain 10 per cent of the world's plants, 12 per cent of the world's mammals, 16 per cent of the world's reptile-amphibians, and 17 per cent of the world's bird species. Massive clearance of forests, particularly primary forests, leads to extinctions, floods, reduced river flows, as well as huge fires.
