But Why?

It’s quite an exciting time to blog about this topic, but why you may ask? Many published scientific articles (which there are too many to list here) suggest that the Earth is now leaving (or has already left) the Holocene, which is the name given to the postglacial geological epoch of the past ten to twelve thousand years. During this time, accelerating during the industrial period, humans have become an increasing geophysical force to a point where we are beginning to dominate (Crutzen, 2002). Leading to the suggestion of the ‘Anthropocene’ where humans will be a major force on the Earth System for perhaps many more millions of years. 

Despite the contention surrounding this ‘man-made domination’ human activity is set to leave an undeliable mark on geological history, aside from my own topic; deforestation, mining and road building have released waves of sediment into the oceans and rivers, the increasing acidification of the oceans as they absorb carbon dioxide will dissolve carbonate from deep sediments, and what is likely to be the sixth great mass extinction in Earth’s history will gather speed, adding vivid new markers to the record (Steffan et al, 2007)

But what has this got to do with CO₂?

Fossil-fuel use and land clearance have already emitted perhaps a quarter as much carbon into the atmosphere as was released during one of the greatest planetary crises of the past, the Palaeocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum 55 million years ago (Nature, 2011). Tripati, Roberts and Eagle (2009) stated that the CO₂ levels today have not appeared in the climate record for the past 15 million years.

What have humans got to do with this?

As the most recent IPCC report has stated (AR5) there is >95% confidence that humans have been the dominant driver of warming since the mid-20th century (IPCC, 2013) where atmospheric levels of CO₂ have risen from 310ppm to current levels of just under 400ppm (Steffan et al, 2007) with a drastic increase over the past 100 years (IPCC, 2007) as seen in graph 1. 

Figure 1

Over the next century this trend is very likely to continue as shown in graph 2 as future temperature development in the highest emissions scenario (red) and in a scenario with successful climate mitigation (blue) – the “4-degree world” and the “2-degree world.”

The IPCC is basically stating here that with successful mitigation we can help damper the effects of future warming and this is evidence enough for change in my opinion.

Figure 2

I’ll leave it at that for now, more to come in due course!

Cheers,

Sam. 

Something of an introduction

This is my first foray into the world of blogging, even though blogs are sometimes confined to the world of protohipsters, people who eat way too much food and others who have way too much time on their hands, blogging can have many more useful exertions. There are abounding scientific blogs which aim to sift through all that is written and provide a concise view on a specific issue, this is hopefully what I will be able to do over the coming months.

The topic that I'm going to cover is that of climate change mitigation and the contentious issue of climate amelioration to help reduce the levels of atmospheric CO₂ and therefore help stop radiative forcing and temperature from spiralling out of control. I’m not here to scare monger and provide some sort of climate change hysteria or consternation, I’m just going to provide scientific literature, journalistic articles and some general musings showing the effects that anthropogenic CO₂ has on the climate of our planet and mainly strategies for change. 

The title of the blog I've chosen is to mainly to say that Earth is, obviously, the only planet we have to live on. Therefore a bit of care and attention to where we live is something that should not be shunned.

Over the coming days I’ll provide some background to the topic but for now I’ll leave it at that. I hope you all enjoy reading my blog and I am actually thoroughly looking forward to writing on this topic.

Sam.