Climatebase Fellowship - Week 2

Learnings

Climate History

  • 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

Global Politics

  • 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

Climate

  • 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

People

Speakers

Fellows

Links

Misc

Articles

Interesting companies